This week: a few scrappy bones, a murderous sandfly, trills that might remind us of birds, subversive puppets, and much more. Enjoy.

There is a quality to the heat this summer that I have started, against my better judgement, to read as mood. It isn’t the heat of a good July — the kind that dries the hay and fills the orchard with wasps and sends everyone, sensibly, into the shade by two. It is a heavier thing than that. It sits on the fields the way a bird sits on a clutch of eggs: close, patient, unwilling to be moved. My garden is barely a garden yet — a square of new turf laid last autumn, the soil under it still builder’s soil, a blank green canvas I have not begun to make anything of. But it looks out onto fields, and between the lawn and the farmland there is a strip of wildflower meadow, and even in this heat the meadow is doing what the meadow does: oxeye daisies gone slightly papery at the edges, vetch scrambling through the grass, a dozen things I am still learning the names of, all of it loud with something at every hour of the day. Beyond it the ground under the far hedge has gone the colour of ash. The buzzards still work the field margins in the long evenings, but low, and without much conviction, as if even they can feel the thermals have turned against them.

To brood is to sit on eggs and keep them warm until something living comes out of them. It is also what we do with a worry that will not leave — we brood on it, we turn it over, we let it heat. The word carries both, and I have caught myself this summer thinking the two meanings have quietly fused. The planet is brooding. It is warmer than it should be, held at a temperature it did not choose, by us; and what is incubating under all that patient heat is not, any longer, only life. It is something closer to grief.

I am wary of writing sentences like that. The register of the ruined planet is a register I distrust, in myself most of all — it flatters the writer, it makes weather into portent, it borrows a grandeur that belongs to the thing and not to the person describing it. So let me stay with the particular, which is the only ground I trust. The papery daisies. The vetch. A blackbird panting in the shade of the fence with its beak open, doing the only thing it knows to do about a heat it has no name for. These are small facts, and they are true, and they are connected to each other and to a hundred thousand things I cannot see, by a web so fine and so total that we have only lately, and only partially, learned to notice it is there at all.

Adam Cairns, The ground has begun to brood

The roses are in full bloom and I accidentally disturbed a fat bumble bee that I think may have been sleeping in the nectar. It was a bit too windy for the insects to be making spectacles of themselves. But I know the solitary mason wasps are hunting caterpillars in the dark spaces between the flowers, under the leaves.

While I was writing this morning a wasp came in the library and buzzed around my head a while. I took a few deep breaths and told myself that she wasn’t likely to bother me. Me, with my unsweetened tea and fennel seeds. It wasn’t long before she got bored of this little room, with the sound of my tapping on the keys, and she left. No need for anyone to dance around with an insect swatter mumbling expletives. I’ve done that.

I don’t know if there is any truth to the saying familiarity breeds contempt. I think that is only true when we want something from the other; we expect something we don’t get; when we see more than we anticipated, or more than we are comfortable with. Familiarity without expectation… I don’t know. Maybe it leads to curiosity. It puts fears in perspective.

The ocean is terrifying. And the cormorants, ghosts of drowned sailors, always pull my rising joy back to the earth. One hand clutching the roses, and the other grasping for the dark and darker blue of the north sea. There is a depth and a width and an understanding that makes an all-too-pure joy seem thin.

Ren Powell, Summer, after its fullness

Will there be, this year, young housemates warring,
screen doors that whomp, wheels grinding gravel?
In this heat, wake us.

Send us street theater, at three in the morning,
mad lovers battling over jealousies, bills,
the whole grand opera.

Watch now in mercy those others, mum
in the iced quiet of their central air,
their curtained sorrows.

Maryann Corbett, On the power of open windows

Summer has started summering, whether we are fully on board with it or not. I’ve spent the past couple days in 90 degree plus Chicago tucked in front of the window AC unit working on some poetry critiques and my own writing, in addition to a couple upcoming dgp books. In between, there are frosty coconut-heavy drinks whipped in the blender, iced tea, and summer treats like strawberries and watermelon. I always feel like summer gets away from me. Or more that it seems like it takes forever to get here, but then slides very quickly away, especially once you hit the 4th of July.

Kristy Bowen, June Paper Boat

I am grateful to have been blogging for so long, grateful for many reasons.  I often go back to re-read old blog posts–by often, I mean at least two or three times a week.  I go back to see what I was thinking/doing, to find recipes, to find rough draft ideas and inspirations, to spark my brain when I feel I have nothing new to blog about.  This morning I found this blog post about a poem idea I forgot I had for a poem called “The Holy Spirit Takes a Holiday”; I haven’t finished the poem, now, a year later, but I still have the rough draft.

This meandering made me think about a summer project, making a rough draft into a finished draft each week.  And yes, that’s one of my new year’s aspirations that has fallen apart as the year progressed (this January blog post has details about my specific intentions for 2026).  But that’s the joy of early July–there’s still time to adjust my trajectory.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Midway Points: Inspirations and Revelations

This week has seen a number of poems flying back to me from various places they had been sent. I am good now at seeing this as a chance to read the poems afresh to work out what needs changing in order to enhance them. One particular poem had a clunky line in the middle where I definitely knew what I meant, but that didn’t necessarily mean other readers would. I enjoyed smoothing that one. I have also started to change my metaphor so I will set poems to sail now rather than fly. This is more in keeping with my desire to do things slightly more slowly and use my time wisely instead of rushing.

I sat in a sold-out lecture theatre this week to hear Ele Fountain speak and to find out who had won the Cheshire Prize for Literature. I love good speeches and was delighted to listen to Ele’s talk. I admire people who can tell their story well and add value to the audience and Ele certainly did that. I then had a quiet revelation when it came to the announcement of the prize winners – I would have loved to have won. That might sound a little obvious as a thing to say, but what I mean is I would have loved to walk down the steps after being announced as a winner. Gone were the feelings of nerves of being on show and here was a feeling of wouldn’t it be purely lovely to win. I used to sit in audiences and want to be invisible and suddenly here I was fully in the moment. I didn’t win, but I did love this new feeling. It felt like an acknowledgement of having grown into myself, and I rather liked that way of looking at it. Here I give a gentle nod to liking my silvered “really surprised hair” and to the difference coaching, and a change of direction have made.

Sue Finch, A BANDSTAND HAT TRICK FOR A SKYLARKER

Quiet days. Not much coming in or going out (the lady at the post office today says she’s missed me, and I’m looking thin). But we had a terrific party for Mike Bradwell’s Axholme at the Bush Theatre in mid-June, and there’s Penelope Curtis’s The Fall to look forward to in September. So this newsletter occupies a holding place.

Humming along in the background is Reznikoff. His major work, Testimony – originally published in sequential books in the 1960s and 70s, following an early version in 1934 – is a masterpiece of 20th-century modernist literature. Fact. It also happens to be a political book. Charles Simic: ‘It should not be surprising that Testimony is rarely assigned at our colleges and universities these days; it causes too much discomfort to those who prefer to know nothing about what goes on in the world.’ Jena Osman: ‘To shine a light from a different angle, to make you think about what’s there in a different way – that’s the best political work that poetry can do.’ August Kleinzahler: ‘J’accuse . . . Crystalline, documental vignettes – dispatches, really, from the front of American capitalism’s assault on the poor, dispossessed and vulnerable.’ Never previously published in the UK, Testimony will be published by CBe early next year – by far its biggest book to date: large format, 608 pages.

Reznikoff – born in Brooklyn in 1894 to immigrant parents, died in 1976 – was one of the Objectivist poets who first published in the 1930s; in the 1960s and 70s they were inspirational figures for a number of British poets working outside the mainstream. While his work has been translated into Polish, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Swedish, not a single book by Reznikoff is currently available in the UK.

Around publication time there’ll be a live reading of the whole text of Testimony over three days in a gallery in central London, with anyone who comes through the door welcome to take part. Alongside Testimony, Redstone Press will publish The Sound of the Street, selected poems by Reznikoff presented alongside photographs of early 20th-century New York by Berenice Abbott and others. Much of Reznikoff’s work was not just self-published but printed by himself; both CBe and Redstone are one-person outfits; the publication of these two books is a statement, of sorts.

Charles Boyle, Newsletter July 2026: Reznikoff

I am sick of being enraged. So often I find myself enraged at the way we have fucked ourselves over. After all those years of creative evolution, from the first hand print on a cave wall, all the way up to this brilliant, beautiful ability to share our experiences through art, through literature, and what do we do? We hand it over to people who want to use a set of algorithms dressed up as a robot with a cute name to plagiarise it and spew out something that has the pattern of art, but no human intuition. If it looks like art it’ll do. Pack it, price it, stick it on Amazon, make some content, sell sell sell.

We’ve devalued the act of creativity, we’ve made creativity look too easy. To be creative is to make mistakes, more and more until you grow into it. It is so uniquely human. It is hard wok, hard won.

Alongside the robbing of our own creativity we have created a system in which we spend a great deal of time in pain, and I feel like it’s getting worse. We’ve slowly moved towards a place where the norm of social media – and the media in general – is rage bait and anger and unkindness. The news now isn’t really news, social media isn’t really social.

The incentives all point in the same direction: create conflict, generate anger, feed resentment.

The London Economic

We’ve become so entwined with social media, with subscription plans, with stuff we can’t own, that I feel used. I feel helpless. I feel puppeted by a handful of very rich men with no concept of the actual world, no regard for it, no need for human creation, human beauty. I am sick of the rage bait. I am sick of the grifting and greed.

Yesterday, driving home from taking mum to an emergency GP appointment, I saw a big fat wood pigeon in the road. It was carrying an ambitiously long twig and was struggling with it. A woman driving in the opposite direction didn’t slow down. Perhaps she wasn’t aware that birds at this time of year are still focussed on nesting and aren’t as quick to get out of the way. She sped towards it, glaring at it. Get out of my way, get out of my way I am important, you are insignificant. It felt like all that rage bait and anger and the dreariness of being forced through this awful machine we’ve made for ourselves had condensed down to this point, the point at which a person cannot slow down, can’t bear to add one or two seconds to their journey to allow another being trying to live its life, to get out of the way safely.

I don’t want live like that. I want to live with more kindness, more beauty, more joy. I can only start where I am, look at what I am doing, how I am doing it.

Wendy Pratt, I am sick of being enraged.

I am very serious and ambitious about writing the best poetry and prose I can, by my own standards. Creating appealing posts and the occasional newsletter? My confidence fails and I can’t consistently fake otherwise. When I submit work for publication, that’s a way of saying, “This is worth your attention.” Social media is a version of the same–not a bad message for a writer to put out there–yet ambivalence plagues me. It’s laziness, embarrassment, a preference other kinds of work, a long to-do list, a sense of being undeserving, disliking the necessary selfies and performance of cheer, frustration in advance at the difficulty of attracting eyeballs, and, as I’m occasionally wise enough to realize, avoidance of what fragments attention.

Studying and teaching the poetry of a century ago hasn’t resolved my mixed feelings. Those poets’ success in their own era had everything to do with connections forged in big cities and at prestigious universities–still primary venues to success, obviously. Glamor, charisma, and good looks helped some modernists, too, even without social media to amplify those assets. Having a big readership or critical acclaim has never been entirely rooted in the quality of the work. Time remedies some of that unfairness, but it’s a slow, imperfect process, never mind the unforeseeable ways some writing ages better than others. Modernists taught us how to read their poetry, after all, and exerted a huge influence on literary values for decades after, shaping what people thought was good. It takes heroic effort just to find the strong work that escaped notice in its day, not to mention figuring out how to argue on its behalf.

Popularity influences what gets written in the first place, too. Artists need varying degrees of contemporary encouragement and support to keep making art. One of my favorite Harlem Renaissance poets, Helene Johnson, won some awards but stopped playing the poetry career game before publishing a book, and only produced a slim volume’s worth of verse in her long lifetime–published posthumously. Social media might have helped her sustain literary connections once she left Harlem. I think it’s helped me, living in a small southern town. The internet generally has benefited me, too–what a gift to read literary magazines or samples of them freely online, compared to hunting out print copies in the occasional bookstore that carried them! But it can also demoralize me to insert myself into social media’s comparison machine. Not posting costs me; so does posting.

Lesley Wheeler, Aiming vs. wandering

It is not the process of making the work – that is a labyrinth you must navigate yourself – it is the task of delivering the work, of having it platformed, of getting it before an audience, that I find so unbearably maddening. This is when the exit signs start flashing.

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

James Baldwin

If I had advice to offer a young creative it would be: prepare yourself for dead ends, for unhelpful suggestions, for vacuous promises and above all for silence. Expect excruciating, agonising silence. If you do ever receive a reply to a speculative email, a response to an application, a reaction to a submission then get ready for seemingly endless meetings with an infinite number of Steves and Hannahs who will all mostly have their cameras off.

Jan Noble, Nº71 Is it suitable for children?

I searched files of poem drafts for July, and found an underwhelming poem in July 2021. Aha. A basic, I-am-bored-and-nothing-is-happening interstitial self-indulgent poem. […]

It’s been a while since I did homophonic translation. Machine translation is too good and too AI to be useful for adding the chaos factor but I can work more from ear.

So I then subject it to pretending what I’m hearing and transcribing sound by sound is a muffled French. See if I can “overhear” anything vivid. […]

Then I translate back to English and see if I can take this randomness and reassemble towards sense. […]

So now although it is language-as-material-based content, it feels more distinctive and alive than the original. We have multiple people and interactions instead of poet-in-solitude trope. We have particulars and actions. We have relationships to the world and to each other. It is less predictable. You don’t know where the poem is going when you start any given line. It travels. It is more of a wake up exercise but it pleases me now.

Pearl Pirie, Revision

My “Self Portrait as Sandfly” is nowhere near finished. The sandfly in question lives in a particular valley in Lima, and is only active after dark. Its bite is deadly to humans. It took researchers a long time to understand why people could walk through this valley in the day time but not after dark.

The poem isn’t finished because I don’t really know why I want to speak in the voice of this death-dealing, invisible to the eye insect. What do I have in common with a murderous sandfly, that only lives because of the particular climatic conditions of that valley? I don’t know yet – I’m hoping that is what will become apparent in the drafting/editing process.

Kim Moore or Clare Shaw, Self Portrait As Gold Dust, As Glitter Ball, As Magic Carpet…

I tend to believe passionately in any collection right up to the point when the proofs are sent off to the printers. Then I decide it’s the worst mistake I’ve ever made, want to change or retract everything, contemplate running away to the rhubarb patch at the bottom of the garden where I used to hide as a kid. This gnawing anxiety eats away at me until – come publication day – there are only a few scrappy bones left.

On that note…. happy publication day to my fourth collection with Chatto & Windus, STEPMOTHER!!

For me, the best part of any new literary project is when it exists as concept, unsullied by my attempts to put it into words. I first started thinking about the figure that animates my new book -The Wicked Stepmother – around 2021, and I lived inside the stories I was researching, imagining the lives of real and fictional stepmothers around the world.

When the writing process begins, there’s the daunting thrill of grappling with form and shape and order, trying to structure your ideas in a way that flows. You’re alive and intent, often frustrated but excited too. You’re building something. When I’m at this stage, I feel the kind of absorption I get on a single pitch rock climb.

Then the editing: a mix of doubt and euphoria. There’s always a point in the pruning and reshaping and expanding of a collection where the whole thing feels destined to collapse. That is when the real work starts. When you think the book won’t work, you’re usually closer than you imagine to finding a solution: creating ‘sections’ only to take them out again, revising your starting point, moving towards a different concluding mood.

Helen Mort, ‘Smile’, says the photographer

There are often times that poems occur that might not fit into the current project, and live on their own, however briefly. My book-length projects are so often held within such particular structures or shared tonal elements, anything beyond those boundaries simply can’t be incorporated, and require alternate housing. When my dear spouse headed to Banff Writing Studios in January 2023 to attend a rare writing space beyond the house, I began the sequence of daily poems that became “edgeless : letters.” She was away for two weeks, but I think this sequence took me nearly a month to craft, sharpen, hone. At that point, I was already a couple of weeks into the composition of the poems that became the collection Autobiography, which itself took a little more than a year from start to finish. But here, this particular lyric stretch didn’t fit with those poems, that project, therefore the opening salvo of an entirely different, albeit related, extended lyric structure. With the poems I was building into “Autobiography” I was attempting a further, third, suite of shorter, stand-alone poems, but this sequence required more space, and more time. Much like the title poem of Snow day, this piece required a new manuscript within which to contain it.

The epistolary form has always intrigued, seeing examples over the years by John Newlove and Lea Graham, among so many others, although this sequence was specifically prompted by Robert Kroetsch’s Letters to Salonika (Grand Union Press, 1983), during which Kroetsch wrote daily and dated epistolary offerings around his then-partner, Smaro Kamboureli, visiting her mother in Greece. She journaled her own travels, later published as In the second person (Longspoon Press, 1985), a title I sorely wish could have been followed by more literary writing (however brilliant Kamboureli’s critical prose). Kamboureli wrote about going home, and Kroetsch wrote about her being away. Across those two weeks, Christine cemented what would become her third published book, Toxemia (Book*hug Press, 2024) [see my essay on such here], as I remained home with our young ladies. Every morning I looked west, and wrote to her, there. Otherwise, I let her be, attempting not to distract her from work. It was all I worked on for a month, setting all else aside, akin to those six weeks I spent composing the title sequence of Snow day, a couple of years prior (a sequence also begun during the month of January, which suggests a kind of renewal, I suppose).

Daily missives, but composed not as the prose poem as Kroetsch had worked, but something pulled apart, allowing the visual elements of the lyric to breathe. One step, and then another.

rob mclennan, edgeless

I guess holding down what have been essentially two full-time jobs for the past six and a half years hasn’t left me much time to send out newsletters or even to write poetry. But here I am again.

Just three days ago, I finally handed the mantle of director of the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference to the amazing Mercedes O’Leary Harness. She’s going to do such a great job making the conference even better. I really enjoyed my time at the helm, but starting last fall, I began to really feel the weight of being responsible for two large literary community undertakings. I’ll still be holding down the fort at Storyknife Writers Retreat, and I consider it a real privilege to be able to facilitate incredible women writers having the time and space to devote to their work.

I’m hoping that the gap that giving something up has opened will be filled with my own writing. It’s going to take a bit of recovery time, but I feel the generative urge trickling around under the surface these day and that makes me so hopeful.

I’ve always found that teaching has really lit a fire under my own work, so when I had a chance to teach an online class in poetry for Orion Magazine Workshops, I accepted. I’ve subscribed to Orion FOREVER, so it’s a real honor to be part of their family.

Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Hello Again!

One of my goals this year has been to send out my work. (Why does “submit my work to the editorial process” sound like a dodgy thing to do? “Send out” sounds more assertive.)

So I belong to a small send-out group, and when our attempt to meet once a month and report our progress seemed a complete disaster, we decided to meet once a week and for one hour hang out on Zoom together and instead of talking or moaning or whatever, to work on our send-out.

This did the trick. I’ve now managed 21 submissions of poems, reviews, stories, and essays. Not a lot, but it’s something. And I’ve had a few things accepted.

First, the on-line journal Eclectica took my poem, “Windfall Apples,” which you can find here (and which I should have mentioned some months ago).

More recently, Bracken took my poem, “Her Honeyed Mask.” Their new issue is fresh off the presses and available here. (And it’s gorgeous.)

Bethany Reid, Where you’ll find me…

I’ve taken a break from submitting my work, to try to break the cycle of anticipation/dejection, to break the spell of maybe. And I’ve been on vacation, so freer to consider myself from afar, and think, okay, what are you, and let’s do something else with that. Or do the same thing differently. Or do a different thing samely. Or quit all together or start something completely new. Or something. The writing game wearies. Yes, I have that new book out, the “One Poet’s Writing Manual,” which is fun, and people have told me they’ve enjoyed it, and those I know well have said it’s like I’m right there talking to them. And I’ve done some presentations and workshops, and have a couple more scheduled. And it’s my fifth book, if you count the two chapbooks. But. I don’t know. I just thought somehow things would be different. At the same time, I’m utterly astonished at what has transpired, what I’ve stumbled into. And at what I’ve done, conjured up, gave a whirl. It’s all very strange, looking back, looking forward, and just looking around. What the hell, man? What the hell?

Marilyn McCabe, strong, but anxious and discontented amid all that messy beauty

 I’ve been writing a lot, and I’ve also been sending the poems out to various journals. I did that last year, too, and I’ve also got some cool self-pubbed stuff planned this summer. At present, I am 99% sure that these three books will show up before August is out:

• The Other Century: A long-awaited (in my mind) chapbook of poems. This is unlike anything I’ve published before, and I’m excited to share it. It comes close to fiction, but it’s also a kind of collage of found material alongside original poetry.
• A reissue of Travis: A lightly revised but physically redesigned version of my chapbook from last June, marking the 50th anniversary of Taxi Driver (on which the book is based).
• A reissue of Interrogation Days (it’s the last time, I swear!): A revised, reorganized, and physically redesigned book marking the 25th anniversary of 9/11 and the 250th anniversary of the US.

These will be priced very cheaply and will be bundled with cool bonuses (miniature collages, bookmarks, free pamphlets, etc.). The books will come out on my Ko-Fi page, which seems a better way of doing this than trying to fashion a “bookstore” page here on substack. 

RM Haines, Summer of Salvage (no. 1)

I’ve spent time recently typesetting my own, next poetry book – having decided to go rogue and try this out for myself. 

I realised how blank and bleak I was feeling, facing the prospect of submitting my emerging manuscript into the current poetry publishing landscape. Not that I have anything against any of it, it was just flattening my spirits contemplating the long waits and inevitable rejections. And quite spontaneously, as is often the way with me, I found I’d decided to try something different and (not uncharacteristically!) go it alone.

I’ve anyway always been employed – when I’ve been employed – as an editor. Not of books, of magazines. But typesetting is a familiar and loved process for me. And I found that part of this endeavour delicious. 

I set myself up in one of my sons’ currently vacant rooms, and turned up there for a week, each morning, to work. I felt happy, sitting in that sunshiny window at his desk and large monitor and familiarising myself with my chosen publishing software, Atticus. I also designed a simple cover in Canva. And, eventually, pulled both together into a proof book printed by Bookvault. 

I’m delighted with this experiment, and though have nervousness about shunting the book out into the world, it’s no more so than I’ve had with all my other (published by others) poetry publications. 

Charlotte Gann, A new era?

Mark Melnick offers an insightful essay on book cover design and marketing as the July contributor to Marsh Hawk’s “Chapter One” series. You can see his entire article HERE, but I present this excerpt because his experienced insight can be helpful to many authors:

“It is also important for authors to understand that ‘graphic design’ is very different from ‘art.’ I have worked with many authors — especially poets — who suggest a painting for their book’s cover. Often, that painting is very dense and complex (think Hieronymus Bosch), and the author will send me a lengthy explanation of their reasoning for using it, the meanings and resonances they see embedded in it, and how it reflects the text. Yet this misunderstands the purpose of a cover. A cover is not meant to be an analog to the text. A cover is not art, which is meant to invite introspection and contemplation, slowly over time. A cover is graphic design, which needs to do its job almost instantly — literally in one second. It is emotional, not intellectual.”

To illustrate his points, Mark comments on my and Daniel Morris’ recent and forthcoming Marsh Hawk books. My COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES is forthcoming in 2027.

Eileen Tabios, MARK MELNICK ON BRILLIANT AND EFFECTIVE BOOK COVERS

Rajani Radhakrishnan’s moving, intense No Way Home tells us what to expect from its opening ‘Prologue’ poem, sub-titled ‘the poet as storyteller’: It is supposed to be a story, a journal/ a confession, a tirade –/ but I will start/ with a poem instead.// There’s something about weaving/ through shadow and light.

Later in the poem she writes that the story or series of poems over more than 100 pages will be About a time that wasn’t supposed/ to mean anything, but did./ About big things remembered,/ about tiny details that remain/ in an empty frame/like disconnected parts.

What follows is an examination of disconnection, of a restless journey, both physical and psychological that has drawn me into it, allowed me to absorb the sense of the struggle, poem by poem. Unusually for me, but perhaps appropriately, I read it in order from first to last. It didn’t feel like a book that would give up its elusive secrets if I just dipped into it, reading a poem here and there. She tells us repeatedly that this is an ordinary story but of course it is anything but. It’s filled with the anxiety and doubt, energy and curiosity that we inherit or develop as our lives take their course. It is a courageous exploration, a mapping of where and how we travel as human beings, and in this case why we sometimes have an urge to return, to relive parts of our lives that a piece of us is saying ‘Don’t go there, don’t look back, it’s too dangerous’.

Bob Mee, NO WAY HOME – RAJANI RADHAKRISHNAN

If all goes well, Contubernales Press will soon bring forth my new book, Shield of Mnemosyne : a poem-sequence, a daybook reply to the Trumpist attack on the Constitutional order of our democracy. I began writing it in May 2024, and the first three chapters were published by Contubernales in my book Parmenides in Minneapolis. (Irish poet-critic Billy Mills reviewed Parmenides here.) The Shield volume assembles the concluding nine chapters; the whole poem was finished in February of 2026.

This work did not emerge from a vacuum. My focus on making large-scale poetic sequences began many years ago. And this 4th of July, the 250th anniversary of US nationhood, got me thinking back to an earlier long poem – a trilogy, finished on May 28, 2000 – called Forth of July.

The book’s title is a bit of a double pun. “Forth”, here, means not just “the 4th”, but the “coming-forth”. And “July”, here means (to me) not just the month, but alludes to my cousin Juliet, Julie – who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge at the age of 19, in the fall of 1971. On one weirdly playful level, the plot of this humongous poem enacts a kind of Orphic search for my vanished Julie (we were born a few days apart, in 1952). But is it also a kind of spiritual emblem : the “coming-forth of Julie” pushes back against the global spirit of Caesarism and militarism (“Julius” vs. Julie), as the sing-along poet sheds his skin, in the American interior, to commune with William Blackstone, “the man who went to live with Indians” (per the Consul, Geoffrey Firmin – protagonist of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano) – and with Black Elk, and with MLK (Martin Luther King).

Henry Gould, On the Forth of July

The next pamphlet from Headless Poet is in the works and indeed really quite imminent. I’m away next week, but I’ll be typesetting it the week after, at which point it gets a series of thorough proofs before going to the printers. The urgency is entirely self-imposed, and has felt a little perverse at times (life is busy), but it’s good to have a schedule if you’re going to get things done, just as it’s always slightly alarming, to someone of my temperament, just how effective a ‘to-do’ list is.

In Snow Bees, Jeremy Noel-Tod re-introduces the poetry of Lilian Bowes Lyon (1895-1949). Jeremy has been making the case for a re-evaluation of Bowes Lyon’s poetry for some time and it’s been both a pleasure and a privilege to help bring this selection into print: the first to draw on the full range of her work since the Collected Poems (1948).1 The more time I spend with these twenty poems, the more that fact amazes me.

To give you a sense of what I mean, and in lieu of something more considered to come, here is “Starlings: 1938”, from Bowes Lyon’s third collection Morning is a Revealing (1941). One of the striking things about Bowes Lyon’s work is the way in which she brings the same “concentrated skilfulness” to isolated, rural Northumberland and wartime London. In “Starlings”, these two worlds begin to come together. It is a remarkable, densely-packed poem, moving in an unsettling (and, I think, entirely convincing) fashion between the flock of birds and images of destruction without flattening the one into the other. And it does this precisely through a series of unlikely combinations: “glib roar”, “tinsel garrison”, “rose-crazed debate”.

Jeremy Wikeley, Dark news on the breeze

I’ve spent three days working on my LINKS page. When I began blogging (22 years ago) we all had extensive links to other blogs, and to various sites of interest. That seems less common now, but I’m still in the old mindset. This is a problem. 

There are a variety of components to this problem. The main one is that I can be interested in too many things. Being online can be like being on YouTube (Hank Green). So many topics! So many interesting topics! I think I want to see / watch / learn more about … all of them. I want more of this writer, this journalist, this presenter. Lately, this physicist (Carlo Rovelli). 

I want to read all the blogs, especially the poetry blogs. Especially the blogs I used to read. I want to find, again, the friends I discovered online years ago. Now I discover Substack, with all its controversies and all those excellent writers I want to follow. This seems to be close to what the blogging community used to be, with comment threads and interconnections. 

There are lots of blog-like “publications” on Substack. There, you subscribe, not follow. Reasonably enough, some writers request payment for their work. Even some poets! Mostly, though, I find more than enough to read without straining my budget. I can also read about philosophy and politics and artificial intelligence and physics and consciousness till I become . .. unconscious. 

Sharon Brogan, LINKS & reading

Pretty sure I’ve mentioned before that I am now aware of three poets at work. I think it was Andrew Neilson that put us in touch (and I\m annoyed I couldn’t make it to Andrew’s do in town a couple of weeks ago. Blame the silly running thing).

Over the course of a few internal messages I’ve been speaking to Adrian Masters. Adrian’s day job is as Political Editor for ITV Cymru, but it was pleasing to discover that he’s also a fine poet. His latest poem in Bad Lillies *is well worth checking out (as are the previous other two). I’ve already told him how much I like the lines

at the sandpaper sound
of a cockerel crowing from an allotment,

at the synthesiser pulse
of fledgling jackdaws.

I especially like the “synthesiser pulse / of fledgling jackdaws”.

And it feels even more relevant as I type, having not long come back from our first go at taming our new allotment space. There is much to dig, much more to do, but I’m glad to have broken some ground on it, and to have not broken ourselves in the process. […]

We nearly didn’t go today. It’s been a long week for both R and me, and I had an attack of the insomnias last night between 12 and about 3am. Why, oh why couldn’t it have been tonight so I would be up when the England game starts?? Oh well. Anyhoo, the point of this is that we did go and we pushed on, but it also makes the poem that follows make more sense to me. I’d asked Adrian for permission to publish a poem form his pamphlet, Accretion, and he said to pick any, so I don’t feel bad about choosing one I don’t think I asked about originally. […]

The whole pamphlet is quite focused on time and gathering perspective. There is very much a long view at play in Adrian’s work that I like and admire. I know and recognise most of what is being described above, the disorinetation of darkness and the early hours, but the clinchers here are the last line of stanza 3 and the final stanza. The way they turn the very human experience into something that adds perspective, provides distance and if nothing else, it adds context

We can’t rail at the night when we’re amongst it in an unintended way. We just named time’s parts, but we didn’t invent it, we don’t own it. I like that. It reminds me that I need to go back to Samantha Harvey’s excellent work of non-fiction (with some fiction in it too), A Shapeless Unease: My Year In Search of Sleep

And on that note, I think I need a nap if I’m going to make it to the football later.

Mat Riches, Nightwithstanding

An attractive quality of these poems is the outsider’s constant searching for self and form. “Mirror” is not only the title of one of Zhang Zao’s most famous poems but also a recurring trope in his oeuvre. Thoroughly grounded in both Chinese and European literature, he seeks “a new tension and melting point,” as Bei Dao wrote in his personal recollection of the author, included in this book. How successful are his sonnet sequences, “Kafka to Felice” and “Dialogue with Tsvetaeva”? The Chinese originals strike as too full of words and ideas, and so lack the pressure cooker of the sonnet form. The free-verse experiments are more interesting, often ranging and strange. One has the great title “Song a Wall Driller and the Ultimate Ear,” but the poem, in fact, pages 179 to 186, are missing from my edition. 

The poem I like best is called “Fly.” It has something of John Donne’s playful eroticism, but also the concision I associate with Chinese verse.

Jee Leong Koh, Zhang Zao’s MIRROR

chaun webster is a poet and graphic designer whose work contends with the spatial, temporal, and interpretive limitations of writing and of the English language with its incapacity to represent blackness outside of regimes of death and dying. He is the author of the hybrid creative nonfiction collection Without Terminus: untraining an archive (2026), and the poetry collections Wail Song: wading in the water at the end of the world (2023) and Gentry!fication: or the scene of the crime (2018), both of which received the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. Webster’s work has also appeared in numerous journals, including Obsidian, Brink Literary Journal,  LitHub, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Rumpus, Angel City Review, Tilted House, and Social Text. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t know that I would say that my first book changed my life.  It was a book of poetry that was thinking about black place and black placelessness, the organized dispossession of material and memory.  I think my perspective changed as and after writing it, specifically, I think I became more critical of the limits of the discursive as a response to material force.  My most recent work definitely has the mark of that first book and the strategies I was using, I’d just say that almost a decade later I am now more sure of myself and methods, especially my use of ambiguity, and abstraction.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I came to poetry by way of the black pentecostal church.  The passionate oratory of the sermons, the repetition within the music, the hum and moan all moved me deeply and marked me in the way I consider sound and breath and return in my own writing.

3 – How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
The length of a project depends, oftentimes I am not always even sure of if what I am doing IS a project.  I am just trying to be present and attentive with the questions that vibrate for me, I’m trying to stay with them, I’m trying to see how they bloom.  Sometimes this becomes a project, sometimes that takes years as it did with Without Terminus.  I’d definitely say that writing is a slow process for me, but the gathering by way of note taking is very much a part of that writing process. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
There are definitely theoretical concerns behind my writing.  How, as Frank B. Wilderson III asks, “does one narrate the loss of loss?” He asks this with regard to black people, the way our loss exceeds a linear teleology, does not have a resolution as might be conceived in narrative.  So how do I approach this problem as a writer? when many times the impulse is to make something known or visible through language, to bring it into coherence.  This also ties to questions I have about the archive, about how we make claims about the past, what we understand to be evidence.  I don’t have many answers, much of my process is just being attentive to the questions.  

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I’m not sure what the role of the writer is in larger culture.  I think the way we may have looked at the public intellectual a generation ago has shifted, and I’m less interested in what it might mean for my work to ascend and speak to truth to power, than to echo horizontally from below.  

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with chaun webster

Yvette Nicole Kolodji is a poet, artist, and former scientist from the greater Los Angeles area. She has published over 100 poems (including haiga) in various journals and anthologies since her debut in 2014 and exhibited artwork in many locations since 2019. Her poetry has won and been recognized by poetry competitions and organizations such as the Haiku Society of America, Haiku Poets of Northern California, and The Haiku Foundation. […]

Your mother, Deborah P Kolodji, was a brilliant poet and editor. Did your mother introduce you to poetry and haiku? How did your relationship with your mother inform and inspire your life and creative work as a child and as an adult?

Shel Silverstein was my introduction to poetry. To this day, I can remember how sad I was in kindergarten when I smeared my peanut butter sandwich on my favorite book, The Giving Tree. Most of my early experiences with poetry were through Silverstein’s books or school. My first experience with haiku was a lesson about syllable counting in second grade. I don’t recall them mentioning seasons or a cut (kireji). It was a lesson to learn syllable counting with a rigid 5-7-5 structure. Unfortunately, this view of haiku overshadowed my view of this form for years.

Of course, I learned to write and analyze poetry in school, but my creativity towards poetry started with an audition. In high school, I reimagined Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 as a marriage counselor discussing what love is to her patients. This was the first time I deeply analyzed and dissected a poem. In high school, I was focused on various theater productions, bands (I played clarinet), and a robotics team. I loved working with the metalworking machinery. Perhaps this was a precursor hint of my fondness towards sculpture. I also sketched often in my notebooks. After my high school art history teacher introduced me to scratchboard, I was hooked. I was mainly focused on theatre, sciences, and dabbling with my visual art in high school and college.

However, in high school, I was introduced to non-5-7-5 haiku by my mother, Deborah P Kolodji, whose interest in haiku began around that time. We would often play a back-and-forth haiku game. Although I enjoyed playing those haiku games and writing collaborative haiku forms with her and haiku friends, I didn’t take my haiku seriously back then. I would often mention how wonderful haiku was at perfecting long form poetry, since it showed me the weight of each word. One day, I came across this haiku by Kaisanjin, which had a profound impact on me:

one umbrella—
the person more in love
gets wet

Kaisanjin

Until this day, this poem is my favorite haiku. In college, I went to a Haiku Poets of Northern California (HPNC) Two Autumn’s reading and stopped by the Yuki Teikei Society’s Asilomar conference. It was not until after college when I started going to the Southern California Haiku Study Group meetings, readings, and assisted in the bookfair at the 2013 Haiku North America conference. I knew I was hooked on haiku when I started dreaming haiku. It began percolating into everyday life. I composed haiku as I drove. I composed haiku when I walked. It would keep me up at night. Haiku seeped into my essence. After I created a haibun for my sculptural floats, I began to create more haiga. Around this time, I started seriously focusing on my visual arts. I began working with more unconventional materials and created sculptures. I expanded my artistic practice to many different mediums and my writing practice to other haiku-related forms and styles of poetry.

Jacob D. Salzer, Yvette Nicole Kolodji

If the conclusion doesn’t seem to provide us with an epiphany — “I pass,” as a last line, feels at first glance obvious and unsurprising; was “the sentinel of space” really going to stop him? — still, the way the poem gets there is full of interest. Its form, abab quatrains of three pentameter lines that drop to dimeter (and to monometer in that final line), enacts a sonic drama, in which momentum juxtaposes itself with stillness. Everything about the poem’s atmosphere is like the image of those ships in the first stanza: riding at anchor, yet somehow, even in their stasis, “Home-bound.”

The progression of images throughout the poem, in fact, makes its own level of drama. Every particular manages to be simultaneously impressionistic, if not actually self-contradicting, and precise. It’s the reflection of the moon in the water, not the literal moon itself, that wavers and contains the slipping fish. Via metonymy, the thing and its image become imaginatively conjoined, providing a setup for the imagistic paradox that follows, in which the water “makes a quietness of sound.”

“Quietness” and “sound” are seeming opposites, yet we know the true thing the phrase implies. What we know as quiet is not the same as silence, which connotes emptiness and absence or, as in those spider webs on which the second stanza ends, entrapment. A quiet night may be full of small sounds and movements — “strange tunnelers in the dark and whirs / Of wings” — that don’t disrupt the quiet, but are part of its enormous, mysterious fabric. A silent night, by contrast, is the night of your padded cell, the night of the grave.

This imagistic progression, then, after all, earns the poem’s abrupt and initially unsatisfying ending.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Home-Bound

The error that Richard Dawkins made in The Selfish Gene and has continued to make over the 50 years since it was first published, is an error of poetry.  

It’s a poetic error in the sense that poetry is the art form of the metaphor and the mistake that Dawkins makes is one of metaphorical choice. 

The problem is with the book’s central metaphor of humans as survival machines. The idea that we are nothing but automaton shells, vessels for our genes, who are the real survivors. […]

As I said earlier, this error of metaphor has been made by a multitude of scientists and philosophers (from Hobbes and de la Mettrie to Skinner and Turing, and more recently Daniel Dennett and Dawkins himself). But to my knowledge it has not been made by any whose field of expertise the use of metaphor is: poets. 

They, by contrast, have tended over the years to emphasise the dissimilarities between humans and machines, and warned of the dehumanising effects of an over-mechanistic world.  

And in the famous case of John Keats, his argument – taken on in full throat by Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow, was against the rationalist, scientific explorations that came with the Enlightenment, and the way they deadened, as he saw it, the joy to be found in the mysteries of the universe. 

His conception of negative capability was a profoundly wise expression of why trying to pin everything down (to box it in) cuts off at the root a sense of wonder in the unknown and the mysterious. And in some cases, the truths hidden but inherent in the illusory. 

His most famous poetic expression of this comes towards the end of Lamia, when the cold, rational, surface-truth of Old Apollonius, reveals Lamia’s identity and thereby destroys both her and her lover Lycias: 

                                               Do not all charms fly 
At the mere touch of cold philosophy? 
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: 
We know her woof, her texture; she is given 
In the dull catalogue of common things. 
Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings, 
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line, 
Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine— 
Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made 
The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade. 

Dawkins was able to argue against this view very successfully in Unweaving the Rainbow because he focused on the wonder that is engendered by scientific discoveries in the natural world. But in making this argument, he was missing a central point of negative capability: that there are truths which science is not capable of getting at. There is no reason not to feel a sense of wonder at the truths science can reveal (my view, Keats may have disagreed) and Dawkins’s description of what is happening in the realm of physics and biology when an individual sees a rainbow is a point well made. He considered Keats to be advocating for self-deception when bewailing the gaze of science on natural beauty, but he ignored the possibility that there are truths in the human experience of natural beauty that science can impede. Keats was receptive, and unusually sensitive perhaps, to such truths, and he found the strict rationality of a scientific worldview restricting in his search for them. Poetry, which allows language to dance around its own limitations, enables rather than restricts this search.

Chris Edgoose, Richard Dawkins’s Big Poetic Mistake

Rhetorical
question: why do I find the foods of my first
colonizer delicious? Ordinary fare: steamed
swamp spinach, fried scad, rice. Delicious,
especially eaten without silverware, but not
served to guests or at parties. Our tongues,
taught to swerve from the language of our
origins. Taught to soften the trills
that might remind us of birds.

Luisa A. Igloria, Tapas

Written in the late 11^th or early 12th century, Le Chanson de Roland (‘The Song of Roland’) is the story of an 8th-century Frankish knight, nephew of Charlemagne, who died in 778 C.E. while leading the army’s rear-guard through a narrow pass in the Pyrenees on the way home to France, following a military campaign on the Iberian peninsula.

Considered the oldest known surviving work of French literature, the poem is a chanson de geste (‘song of deeds’), a legendary account of the ‘heroic’ actions and martyrdom of Charlemagne’s knights. The form emerged around the time of the first Crusade, when Christians sought to retake control of the Holy Land, and it continued to flourish throughout the 16^th century.

In contrast with actual events, the poem describes an epic battle against paien (pagans) and ‘Saracens,’ a broad term used by medieval Christians to refer to Muslims. In reality, the Battle at Roncevaux Pass involved an ambush by the Basques, a people indigenous to the Pyrenees, who were retaliating after Charlemagne’s army ransacked their villages and destroyed their capital at Pamplona.

According to the poem, however, the ambush was part of a plot against Roland, orchestrated by his stepfather in league with the enemy. Roland is slain, but his pious devotion to god and king, and his willingness to martyr himself in battle, earns him a place among the angels.

Adam Miyashiro, Professor of Medieval Literature at Stockton University, has described Le Chanson de Roland as “a product of both European nationalist and colonial aspirations.” In his translation, Roland’s war-cry during the battle is full of religious zeal and alarming certitude:

“Paien unt tort, e chrestiens unt dreit!”
(‘Pagans are wrong, Christians are in the right!’)

Roland the crusading evangelist may have been proud to die a martyr for his faith and for his king, but was he merely a pawn in the game? A paladin, or a puppet?

In the 19^th century, Sicilian Opera de Pupi began reinventing these medieval epic poems to explore powerful themes of honor, justice, loyalty, oppression, and resistance, as shaped by Sicily’s own struggle against invasions by foreign armies and imperial powers. Their version of the stories reflected a blend of linguistic and cultural influences, including Byzantine, Norman-French, Spanish, Arabic, and Italian.

Opera de Pupi transformed and subverted the old epic poems into stories of everyday heroes and unexpected victories, in which women could be knights, noble bandits prevailed, and clever peasants became advisors to kings. ‘Pagans’ and ‘Saracens’ were no longer the enemy, and Christians and Muslims both faced obstacles to overcome. Just as the handcrafted puppets reflected a distinctive Sicilian identity, the puppeteers also became artisans of their craft of storytelling and performance.

Jenevieve Carlyn, In the House of Puppets

What makes Marston Moor the best of [Payne] Fisher’s poems […] is its unresolved ambiguity. Fisher fought himself at Marston Moor, on the losing royalist side, and was imprisoned afterwards. The earliest drafts of the poem are straightforwardly royalist laments for the horror of the siege and the disaster of the defeat, in which Oliver Cromwell, who was Manchester’s second-in-command, takes the role of the devil. The revised and massively expanded poem published in 1650, which won such success with Cromwell that it secured Fisher a paid job as his poet for the next eight years, shifted momentum to acknowledge the glory and power of the Parliamentarian success, but Fisher by no means forgot about the suffering of the other side. Long passages describe the miserable conditions of the besieged people in York, their joy at being relieved, and the terrible royalist losses on the battlefield.

It is interesting that Cromwell was so impressed by a poem that is essentially so even-handed.

Victoria Moul, Like a patient Angler e’re he strook

I recently wrote a review of the book Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War.

Here’s a short excerpt:

It’s significant that as I began writing this review about Convergence: Poetry on the Environmental Impacts of War, a collection of poems reacting to the devastating ecological consequence of war, that our nation was again engaged in a new one. Rockets and drones were taking thousands of human lives, but also leaving lasting damage to land, water, and atmosphere. It will likely be decades until we understand the full extent of this war’s human, political, and environmental cost on our world.

You can read the whole review at Consequence Forum Substack here.

Grant Clauser, Review of Ecopoetics War Anthology: Convergence

Thinking of John Berger and his thoughts on the male gaze (I’m sure he thought we’d be well past bringing him up on this subject by now), I took And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, off the shelf. What a lovely thoughtful book that has been. Poems are nearer to prayers, he says. And, “Poems, regardless of any outcome, cross the battlefields, tending the wounded, listening to the wild monologues of the triumphant or the fearful. They bring a kind of peace. Not by anaesthesia or easy reassurance, but by recognition and the promise that what has been experienced cannot disappear as if it had never been.” He says, “The promise is that language has acknowledged, has given shelter, to the experience which demanded, which cried out.”

Shawna Lemay, Art’s Power to Change You

Stars curl
and spiral

this night

O the sight
of all that

blue
and red
and white

all that
bursting

all that
fire

all that
might

Maureen Doallas, The Flag on the Fourth of July

A couple of weeks ago I encountered this poem by “Alabama-born, Appalachian and Palestinian” poet Mandy Shunnarah thanks to a Facebook group called Read A Little Poetry. The poem has stayed with me, and I’ve been thinking about why that is and why it speaks to me. […]

“It’s not Palestine / like old buddy, old pal” is a great line. The choice to end two lines with “Palestine” and “Falastin” — almost the same word but not, which is the point. I’ve had Mo Husseini’s extraordinary essay A letter from the margins on my mind since I read it, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the name Palestine and the diaspora experience he describes.

The second stanza is where the poem really tugs at my heart. My grandparents were immigrants too, and I remember my grandfather’s struggle with certain English words that never emerged the way he wanted. (“Sheet” was a particular bugbear.) My grandfather spoke seven languages, which was amazing! but he knew his English was accented.

I think of how my mother, a naturalized American citizen who was born in Prague in 1936, chose short, simple, all-American names for her kids, especially for the three sons who were born to her first. I think about the tensions between assimilation and remembrance, about the old-fashioned or “foreign” Jewish names that I see now mostly in cemeteries.

The poem asserts that “only an American” would choose an aspirational name, one they themselves can’t easily say. I recognize that sense of leaning toward the future even at the cost of generational disconnect. My family’s immigrant story is different than this one, but they rhyme, as it were. There’s something tender for me about that. […]

Against all of these backdrops this week I encountered this beautiful essay by Jennifer Elise Foerester, a member of the Mvskoke people, shared on FB via the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

She begins:

What if we listened to each other in the language of poetry?
Poetry is a language of deep listening.
Listening to each other in this way would be a listening that does not demand an answer, a translation, or defense; it would be a listening that acknowledges not knowing, that does not preclude the possibility of new perspectives.

Jennifer Elise Foerester, Beyond The Obvious

I love the idea that when we listen to each other as to a poem, we cultivate a spirit of radical welcome. I love the idea of poetry as a language of deep listening — an increasingly lost art in these polarized and angry times. The FB conversation I saw about Shunnarah’s poem was pretty polarized and angry. I didn’t experience much readiness to listen there.

I get the anger. (I really do. I’ve shared a few very angry poems of my own, of late.) But I want us to be able to listen in a way that both upholds our own truths and keeps us open to the truths of others. I don’t want to respond to poems with defensiveness; I want to cultivate openness. In poetry, as in spiritual life, multiple things can be true at the same time.

Rachel Barenblat, Two poems and a dream of America

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists against probability, belongs to that region of the universe where the wildest bet may be the winning bet.

When she met Alice Methfessel, Elizabeth Bishop had served as Poet Laureate of the United States, had won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, had spent the better part of her youth in solitude and the better part of her middle age in South America with the woman she loved for seventeen years, who had taken her own life three years earlier.

Across their stations, across their age difference, across the abyss of possibility between their era’s parameters of permission, Elizabeth and Alice fell deeply and enduringly in love — a love that comes abloom on the pages of Megan Marshall’s delicious biography Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast (public library).

Soon, they were beginning each day with a ritual refrain: “Good-morning I love you.” The “blue blue blue” of Alice’s eyes became the sky of a new world shimmering with new life. More poems poured out in a spring than had in a decade. They swam together in the Galápagos, admiring the flamboyance of flamingos, and in the Greek Isles, admiring the poppies and their thousand shades of red. Whenever they were separated by Elizabeth’s itinerant life as a public poet, she sent Alice “love — housefulls, churchfulls, airportsfull” and carried her photograph in her breast pocket. She revised her will to leave everything except her books to Alice.

After five years together — years of extraordinary creative vitality for the poet, but also years of savage struggle with alcohol — Alice, exhausted by Elizabeth’s increasingly out-of-control drinking to the point of collapse, met a young man who soon proposed.

“I want you to be happy and good and loved,” Elizabeth told her in a touching reminder that the deepest measure of love is wanting the best possible life for the other person. But she was heartbroken.

She coped the way all artists do.

What began as mostly prose became, seventeen drafts and several titles later — “How to Lose Things,” “The Gift of Losing Things,” “The Art of Losing Things” — one of the greatest poems ever written […]

When she learned that Alice had decided to accept the proposal, Elizabeth was devastated. With the helpless vulnerability of love laid bare, which neither pride nor prejudice can touch, she wrote to her:

I DO want you to be free, darling — that wouldn’t ever make me stop loving you… You can always have me back if ever you should want me… truly.

And then she sent her the poem.

Nobody knows what beckoned Alice back — the poem, the way a badly sprained ankle signaled Elizabeth’s fragility and made Alice shudder at the thought of losing her, or simply the inexplicable gravitational pull of love that eludes, always eludes, theory.

“I like being with you more than anyone else in the world,” Alice wrote to Elizabeth that summer.

They remained together until death did them part — one awful October evening, a cerebral aneurysm left Elizabeth’s body for Alice to find on their bedroom floor.

Maria Popova, The Art of Losing and the Art of Beckoning Love Back: The Story Behind One of the Greatest Poems Ever Written

Whatever else we might do in our lives, death is the thing we all will do. Most of us would rather not think about that. Here, then, is where the poets step in. Our readers may recall, for example, Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” which takes death’s inevitability as its subject. Tennyson, the laureate, speaking for a country and a culture, asks the very question nobody wants to ask: “How will we die?” For her own part, Emily Dickinson takes the question closer to the bone. She considers not how a culture, a generalized entity, might think about mortality, but instead, how she herself, an unrepeatable human I, will die. What, she repeatedly wonders, will that actually be like? […]

In sequence she describes the “Funeral in my Brain” as an entirely auditory experience, nightmarish perhaps particularly for the claustrophobic among us whose recurring bad dream of live burial the poem encapsulates. The speaker, confined in her viewless coffin but entirely awake, hears the tramping feet of mourners, the monotone drumroll of the church service, the creaking of boots as her coffin is lifted and carried to some solitary place, where she finds herself abandoned — “Wrecked, solitary, here” — for eternity. “Here” all sound stops; here ends the poem, presumably.

But at this point we should stop and remind ourselves that the public-domain version of the poem we’re reading is the one that appears in Poems: Third Series, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and published in 1896, ten years after Dickinson’s death. Todd and Higginson clearly agreed that dear Emily could not possibly have meant all those em-dashes, but also that she could not possibly have meant the poem as it appears in her manuscripts, with a final stanza beyond the one given here — a stanza that changes everything:

And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down —
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing — then —

In this original and necessary final stanza, the speaker, like a person being hanged, feels the “Plank in Reason” break beneath her. As the poem ends, on an inconclusive em-dash, its thoughts cut short, its speaker drops utterly out of “knowing” into the unimaginable, timeless, silent mystery beyond. It’s a terrifying prospect, that moment when “knowing” ends: the moment when the self stops being the self, or at least stops being sure of being the self, or of anything at all.

Yet as a restoration of the poem in its wholeness, this true ending offers a corrective to the nightmarish sense of being buried alive, on which the expurgated version of the poem ends. Death in Dickinson’s vision is not a desert island, a solitary shipwrecking, but something far stranger, outside the bounds of human knowing. If it’s a terror, it’s also a liberation and a darker, wilder hope, for which human language, in all its knowing, has no word.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: I Felt a Funeral in My Brain

if you whisper your truths,

they’ll disappear, he’d say, so he never whispers them –
and when he does speak, his voice is the wild thud
of trees falling oceans from here in cool shimmers

of rain, in the hot curl of asphalt, in all the time needed
though there’s so little now to do, and he’s prayed deep
into the hole of his aching, but that’s not how it ends –

Sam Rasnake, Some Last Things

This week, days bear their teeth, fantasy and reality rhyme, attention is a form of loss, and the poem has stopped showing and started naming. Enjoy.

The sudden early morning wind whipped up my loose hand-written pages of new poems and took them away, high over the gardens, scattered them who knows where. I apologise now for the litter they became. I sat at the patio table and watched them go. There are no copies. And so I began again the old process: wait, watch, hear, remember, get it down. It’s all memory, whether a second or two or a thousand years ago. I look again at notes from life in a lighthouse, on cliffs, among ruins, among ghosts, both up there and in a village where I’ll always be an outsider. Life on the outside, a life of faith – in what, is my business – emptiness.

Bob Mee, ON A DAY WHEN THE WIND WHIPPED UP MY LOOSE PAGES OF POEMS AND TOOK THEM AWAY, HIGH OVER THE GARDENS

Yesterday, towers stood like gleaming
sheaths beneath the broiling sun as though
they would withstand every form of violence.
Yesterday, a sinkhole yawned open at the exit
from the freeway. Days bare their teeth and
gums. The wind smears pastes of insect
bodies on glass. I am trying not to think
of these as plagues pouring out of the sky.

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

I have here A Chorus of Ears by Denise Riley, newly published. Four essays ‘On the Voice of the Poem’. A few pages in I know I’ll have to slow down and listen – as one might with a poem – as her elegant, rather wry hugely intelligent sentences unfold. I also suspect that ere long I’ll be standing on the table cheering. On page one already Riley is asking how writers may ‘preserve their freedom not to acquiesce in the zeitgeist’s tendency to aggrandise the poetic persona, with its platformed competitiveness’. Soon, she’s talking about how thought – and poems – surprise us in their making, or ought to. Many writers will know it’s not oneself, the poet, who makes the true utterance, it’s not our ‘voice’ or that of our people but ‘it’s the voice of language itself which is trying to speak’. For it to do so, ‘all the accidents of your authorship need to fall away’.

Kathleen Jamie, What We’re Reading This Summer

Here in Canonbury Square George Orwell completed Animal Farm and began work on 1984 and it is here where we encounter one of literature’s often forgotten poets. Enter Ampleforth. Ampleforth is the poet in 1984 who, like the main protagonist, falls foul of the system. Ampleforth is devoted to poetry and despite having to translate old works into Party approved texts he does so dutifully and carefully until he makes one fatal mistake. He fails to replace a banned word. He fails because he cannot find a suitable substitute for the word ‘God’. Ampleforth is arrested and punished not because he believes in God but because he believes in rhyme, in music, in the integrity of poetry.

I am sitting in Canonbury Square in the June heat, having completed a short walk from Louis MacNiece’s house just up the road and suddenly I feel utterly lost. Here I am in the summer sun and I can’t find another word for God. I feel suddenly abandoned by something that I cannot describe. Close by a small boy kicks a ball off the green. It rolls into the road. He doesn’t know whether to follow it or not. He looks for his mother. Across the way an angry man is shouting with a can of lager, barking insults at the neatly tended Canonbury borders and I am both of them, I am both a boy without his ball and a man angry with a can.

In the morning I’d visited my mother at the same care-home where I’d watched my father lose his capacity for speech, where his vitality for language abandoned him. My mother is smart and articulate but many of the other residents have been robbed of conversation, have forgotten how to ask for anything, can’t remember what it is they’re asking for and I am all of them too. And the boy who doesn’t know what to say to his mam and the man rattling with a can. And I am thinking of George, working diligently, articulately on his stories, preserving words in careful order, knowing the war will soon be over when I remember that it’s Father’s Day. It’s Father’s Day and I feel utterly lost but now I understand why.

Jan Noble, N°70 Bunting and rubbish

It’s been a quiet week here. Remember that tooth that kicked me out of the writing residency at the beginning of the month? Finally got it fixed, but it took almost a week to recover. On Tuesday, it was ninety degrees. Today it was gray and in the sixties. The Strawberry moon tonight looks more like spooky October than end of June. Meanwhile, I’ve been watching birds and listening to audiobooks and watching Film Noir on TCM. […]

Saturday is the 4th of July and the 250th anniversary of this fair country. This week the Supreme Court ruled, in line with Donald Trump’s well-known contempt for not just women and people of color but also disabled people (sound like any Hitlers you know?), that people with disabilities don’t have a right to live in their own homes. A lot of us are worried this means a return in being placed in institutions for being “inconvenient.” You can read more about it here. A load of laughs, right? It also took away some of the rights of people to claim asylum here. Whenever I get a bit of patriotism back, like while watching the World Cup, the USA reveals just how evil it can be. It’s hard to stay upbeat.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Recovery Week with Goldfinch, Almost Fourth of July and the 250th, and the Question of Patriotism

Last week the mayor of a city
most of us don’t live in
used the word “monsters” to describe
a political action committee.

Also last week a woman in Texas
was sentenced to fifty years
because she read “political zines”
about feminism. A gay man

who works as a public servant
was kept from his children.
At least one ceasefire
ceased its ceasing.

Rachel Barenblat, Ragebait

Jennifer Martelli’s “Dear_________,” begins with a paradox: “Today, to ease my anxiety, I thought of the scariest scene in The Shining—” The speaker then takes us into the opening sequence, in which a small Volkswagen travels through a mountain landscape while the camera follows from high above. What frightens the speaker is the scale of the view: “the vastness / of America,” the mountains, the road crossing into a place so immense that “only a helicopter or bald bird of prey” could follow it and comprehend “what kind of country this was.”

That gaze reappears at the end of The Shining, in the old photograph hanging in the haunted hotel. Jack Nicholson’s character stands in the foreground at a July Fourth celebration in 1921, though the film has taken place decades later. “He’d always been there,” Martelli writes, “celebrating America’s birthday.”

This move underscores the horror of realizing that the film’s violent man is part of the hotel’s past and, additionally troubling, how he may never have been separate from that past. Patriarchal violence is not an interruption of the national story. It is already inside the photograph, the celebration, and the country’s account of itself.

From there, the poem turns toward its unnamed recipient: “I see you in many men.” The blank in the title permits the addressee to remain particular while also becoming representative. One man proliferates into “angry men, bloated, omnipresent, powerful,” men frightened by “their own impossible hungers.”

That word, hungers, carries the poem into its final intimate turn, when the speaker remembers the Fatted Calf restaurant down the street. After six weeks of being unable to eat, she orders a rare burger and thick fries. “Finally,” the poem ends, “I could keep something down.”

The difference between the men’s hunger and the speaker’s hunger is crucial. Their “impossible hungers” appear boundless: appetites for power, control, possession, and permanence. The speaker’s hunger is physical and finite. Her body needs food. The ability to receive it, to eat and keep it down, is ordinary, but the poem makes that ordinariness profound.

José Angel Araguz, What Kind of Country This Was: On Jennifer Martelli’s “Dear_________,”

As part of the campaign to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal, [Emma] Lazarus wrote a poem to be read at a fundraising auction in December 1883. A poet well-versed in New York literary circles, Lazarus was herself the descendant of earlier Jewish immigrants to New York. Passionate about helping recent immigrants overcome the hardships they faced, she devoted her time to the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society, after the Russian pogroms of the 1880s resulted in another influx of Jewish immigrants to the city. She also worked to establish the Hebrew Technical Institute, which further helped Jewish immigrants acclimate to life in New York.

Her poem, ‘The New Colossus,’ was styled after an Italian sonnet, during an era when large numbers of European immigrants were arriving in the U.S. in waves. In contrast with the Greek ‘Colossus of Rhodes,’ a male figure that presided over the harbor in Rhodes in the 3rd century B.C.E., Lazarus saw this new American colossus as a welcoming maternal figure, unarmed, and bearing a torch to light the way.

Read aloud at the fundraising gala in 1883, Lazarus’s poem included these now-famous lines:

Give me your tired, your poor,
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

It may have been the only poem read at the auction that night. While it did garner interest in raising funds for the pedestal of the statue, Lazarus’s poem was not widely remembered in her lifetime. Pulitzer’s fledgling newspaper, The World, did print it following the auction, but The New York Times chose not to publish it, a decision it rectified decades later.

As it turned out, Lazarus was away in Europe in 1886 when the statue was finally unveiled in New York Harbor, three years after the fundraising campaign began. Her poem was not mentioned at the dedication ceremony, and she died the following year.

It was only after her death that her poem was reunited with the Statue of Liberty, the Mother of Exiles, through the efforts of one of her friends. In 1903, the words Lazarus penned twenty years earlier were officially inscribed on a plaque placed inside the base of the statue.

Jenevieve Carlyn, Blood from Stone

I’ve always found the summer to be the only season in which I struggle to write poetry. Of course, an extraordinary heatwave like the current all-but-unbearable one inhibits doing very much except lounging about in whatever shade there is. Jackie Wills’s brilliant new collection aside, I’m also struggling to concentrate on reading; or doing anything else of consequence for that matter, though I enjoyed watching Ecuador win last night. If only all the World Cup games were on in the afternoon and evening . . .

That said, I finished a rare political-ish poem last week and sent it off to the Morning Star, who have since said they’ll publish it in August. As a lifelong leftie, it does my heart good to help to support a publication with values broadly similar to my own. I never quite understand why poets might, instead, want to place poems in right-wing rags, like The Spectator, which gives platforms to some truly odious far-right ‘thinkers’, such as very far-right Douglas Murray (its associate editor) and Max Klinger, and is edited by Michael Gove for pity’s sake. It also happens to be owned by Paul Marshall, the hedge-funder who set up GB News. I like its poetry editor Hugo Williams and most of his corpus of poetry as much as anybody does, but, to me, The Spectator’s values aren’t in the slightest bit compatible with the inclusivity of poetry.

I don’t buy the argument that getting poems published in journals and papers which don’t specialise in poetry must be a good thing per se; or that putting poetry in front of the sort of people who like to read very right-wing tripe might broaden, perhaps even change, their minds. I suspect that is very unlikely. In the same way that publications are necessarily picky about the poems they publish, poets surely have a moral responsibility to be picky about where they attempt to place their poems.

A counter-argument is that placing left-leaning political poems in left-leaning publications like the Morning Star and the New Statesman will only preach to the converted, but how likely is it that a right-wing publication would publish a left-leaning poem or even one that, say, even tangentially alerted the reader to the horrendous adverse impacts of climate change?

Matthew Paul, Summer daze

To Phrase a Prayer for Peace, by Donna Spruijt-Metz:

from Day 63

I walk
through my unbombed neighborhood—
I sit in my white
studio to write to YOU—

More than any poem in this very moving book, which at its core is a diary Spruijt-Metz kept during the first 120 or so days of Israel’s war on Gaza, these four lines capture the essence of the struggle—spiritual, ethical, moral—that I think any American Jew of good conscience faced in coming to terms with the brutal reality of Hamas’ attack on the one hand and, on the other, the far more brutal reality of Israel’s response. While the poems gesture at times towards the contested historical context(s) through which all sides to that conflict give it meaning, Spruijt-Metz is more concerned with trying to reconcile the “unbombed” comfort in which she lives with the inevitable concerns Hamas’ attack raised about Jewish safety and the concerns about Jewish identity and community raised by Israel’s response. Spruijt-Metz holds herself accountable for the privilege of her position by weaving the mundane details of her life through the book like a recurring motif in a piece of music, constantly reminding herself and her reader that part of the reason she has the luxury of wrestling with these questions in this form is that she is not in any immediate, mortal danger. In the end, To Phrase a Prayer for Peace is a book-length wrestling with the transcendent presence she addresses as YOU, an attempt to find a Jewish answer to a question that is not the obvious one of how this YOU could allow things like the Hamas attach and Israel’s response to happen, but rather of how it is possible through whatever it is that YOU represents to find a path into a different way of being in the world. Given how much more brutal and complex the war in the Middle East has become—and it is in so many ways just one war, isn’t it?—it may seem odd to return to a book written in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023, but precisely because of that increased brutality and complexity, the questions Spruijt-Metz wrestles with are more relevant than ever.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Four by Four #56

Vulnerability Index, Elizabeth Robinson, Curbstone Books/Northwestern University Press, 2025, ISBN: 9780810149205, $20.00 […]

In her Introduction to Vulnerability Index, Elizabeth Robinson talks about her work with the homeless, or better still, unhoused of Boulder, Colorado and her experience of ‘crushing depression’ and how the openness and generosity of the unhoused people she worked with helped her deal with it. She challenges the stereotypical views of the people she worked with that are often held by the comfortably housed, and, crucially for the poems that follow, speaks of the vital, difficult need to pay attention to others. The poems are acts of attention, while recognising the difficulties involved:

My attentions are crude, raw.

I begin to think that all attention is a form of loss.

because it cannot create perfect reciprocity
with its focus.

And yet Robinson continues, through these poems, to attend to the world of her unhoused clients, to understand them not as a problem, but as individuals each with their own attributes and their own reasons for the lives they lead. Which is to say she attends to the world she moves through not only looking but seeing. And these are the kinds of things she sees:

On Why He Doesn’t Want Housing

“A body that is in motion stays in motion.
A body that comes to rest stays at rest.”

He’s afraid he’ll die if he stays inside.

and

He is asking and he is he is asking and
he is asking and asking for

something. Not for resolution
in which this story has zero
confidence, but for relief.

Relief as a hinge between
death and survival.
An imbalance

that no story can right into equilibrium.
(from ‘Do Not Resuscitate’)

Formally, Robinson deploys a range of strategies, from lists through pieces based on responses to official forms to snatches of overheard conversation. The list and form-based poems provide glimpses into the relationships between the unhoused protagonists and a system designed, it would seem, to humiliate them:

Says they discharged me at eleven and I walked around in the dark all night, snow blowing everywhere, wearing only this T-shirt, jeans, and my flip-flops, nowhere

warm to go.
(from ‘Inmate’)

The understated tone of the writing, here and throughout the book, is carefully contrived and lends a dignity to the people Robinson writes about that society generally denies them.

Billy Mills, Elizabeth Robinson and Bruce Parkinson Spang: A Review

How this little poem swarms with wretched lives that seem to start up almost one to a line! Baudelaire’s genius for metaphor takes a striking turn here, seeming to pile presence on presence, pressure on pressure, in a way that reflects the crowded claustrophobia of nineteenth century metropolitan life. “Pluviôse” – name of the rainy fifth month in the French Republican Calendar, straddling January and February – becomes an irritable god pouring water in floods from an urn. Personified like this, he’s not only seen as causing the conditions the city struggles under, but himself seems oppressed by a discontent that makes him lash out at everything and everyone around him. The poem in fact develops as a series of brilliantly self-contained images like tiny video clips, each inviting the reader to dwell on it and expand it in his own collaborative imagination. Most brilliant, to my mind, is the final one with its ripples of teasing suggestion. There’s an animating friction between squalid and glamorous connotations – squalor in the “sales parfums”, a flicker of discordant glamour in “le beau valet de coeur”. There’s an arresting element of surprise at the way these court cards suddenly start into speaking, three-dimensional life. Readers will imagine different scenarios. For myself, though I don’t know if this is a result of letting the English meaning of “sinister” weigh too heavily, I picture the knave of hearts (the valet de coeur) and the queen of spades (the dame de pique) putting their heads together, whispering like a pair of conspirators from Goya’s black paintings. As they look back on their dead loves, “sinistrement” makes us feel they’re doing so sadly, gloomily and (to the unsympathetic spectator) boringly, but also that their doing so is disquietening, sinister in the English sense, and perhaps somehow ill-intentioned. All the tiny vignettes quiver with varying suggestions, though. In “Aux pâles habitants du voisin Cimetière”, for example, “habitants” seems to treat the cemetery as just another district of Paris, blurring the line between the living and the dead. And why are they pale? Because they’re ghosts, yes, but they also seem to be shivering with cold, hunger, disease, dread, like the living poor.

Edmund Prestwich, Imagery in two of Baudelaire’s Spleen poems

Larkin’s extraordinary formal command becomes in the mature poet so absolutely assured that it is almost invisible. But in these poems you can still catch him experimenting, as in these sapphics from 1949, which are not systematically quantitative but certainly partially so. If you have any Latin lyric in your head, I think it’s impossible to read this poem and not feel sure that Larkin, too, had at some point read some lyric verse in Latin:

Sinking like sediment through the day
To leave it clearer, onto the floor of the flask
(Vast summer vessel) settles a bitter carpet —
Horror of life.

Huge awareness, elbowing vacancy,
Empty inside and out, replaces day.
(Like a fuse an impulse busily disintegrates
Right back to its root.)

Out of the afternoon leans the indescribable woman:
’Embrace me, and I shall be beautiful’ –
’Be beautiful, and I will embrace you’ –
We argue for hours.

This is not a successful poem, and Larkin would probably have been horrified to see it published at all. It’s obviously an experiment: an experiment in metre, but also in metaphor, simile and the unexpected transition. That muddled simile of an impulse like a fuse disintegrating to its root must be remembering, and reversing, Dylan Thomas’ ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower’. (Thomas’s particular kind of romanticism was hugely fashionable in the 40s.) The poem is trying to do too much, and its dense abstraction doesn’t convince. Still: ‘out of the afternoon leans the indescribable woman’ is a very good line, even if it would be better without that unnecessary ‘indescribable’. Her role and position in the poem should itself tell us that, like Lycidas or Chloe in Horace, she cannot and need not be described.

You can hear in these lines the recurrent choriamb (— uu —) which is the ‘signature tune’ of sapphics and various related metres in Latin and Greek. Larkin no doubt read some Horace at school or university, as well as some of the English attempts at sapphics that crop up quite regularly in English poetry between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. He was perhaps influenced also by the choriambic music that recurs occasionally in both Hardy and Pound (as well as, for example, Bunting and Sisson, though both too late to be in play here). But the poem is obliquely Horatian in other ways too: many of Horace’s odes begin with a philosophical or political theme only to introduce an erotic object (whether boy or girl) at the very end. Sex in Horace is always both a distraction from, and a reminder of, the brevity of life. And Larkin here imitates too, actually quite unusually in English lyric, the signature shape of an Horatian ode, which typically ends somewhere quite different from where it began.

Victoria Moul, Larkin’s odes

The poetry of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was once so well known, filling page after page of school anthologies, that editors would often seek out his lesser-known poems, just to present something a little different — the B-sides of his greatest hits, on the assumption that everyone already knew the A-sides.

That assumption is just not true anymore. “The Rape of the Lock” is assigned, when assigned at all, with a trigger warning. “Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady” — Pope’s surprisingly un-Pope-like poem — has mostly disappeared. And then there’s An Essay on Man, the four-part work published from 1733 to 1734, that was once considered Pope’s major work and a necessary adjunct to any general education. We’re left, these days, to remember the A-sides before we get to the B-sides — beginning with today’s extract, the most glittering passage from his most glittering work, in the full power of his rhymed pentameter couplets.

But it’s also worth pointing out that this passage, the opening lines of Epistle II, appears at war with its form. The easy flow of heroic couplets — the deft arrangement of parallel constructions, for that matter — demonstrates an intellectual confidence that the actual content ostensibly declares does not exist. To be a human being is to be “In doubt his mind and body to prefer; / Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err” — and yet, notice the mastery of the chiasmus: mind/body, inverted to mortal body/erroneous mind. The poet is in charge, holding firm to his explanation of our infirmity.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: An Essay on Man

The speaker phonetically translates “moon” into “mun” which creates the right sort of sound but is the wrong word. As her thoughts digress, the word for moon surfaces. She’s not really forgotten, the word is there in her hindbrain, it just took a distraction for it to surface.

“The Symmetry of Fish” is an exploration of language, not just as words or letters on a page, but how words are spoken, the effort it takes to speak and the anxiety of getting it wrong. Cho’s poems feature the act of speaking, facial expressions and the way a mouth is manipulated to get the right sound in order to be understood. Her poems are a lyrical probing, teasing out what it means to be understood and to understand how someone caught between two countries, two cultures, two histories can honour both.

Emma Lee, “The Symmetry of Fish” Su Cho (Penguin Poets) – book review

Jacobea Vulgaris or Senecio Jacobea, a two-faced weed:
poisoner of horses and cattle when it’s dry

but a flourishing source of nectar for so many
species of invertebrates I cannot begin to name,

except for the day-time flying scarlet and black
Cinnabar moths that flutter around me as I tug

the yellow flower-topped stems from the ground,
or plant a fork into the clawlike purple roots and lift.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Ragwort

I’m admittedly a bit behind on the work of Calgary poet, editor and publisher Kyle Flemmer, the author of Barcode Poetry (Calgary AB: The Blasted Tree, 2021), Supergiants (Hamilton ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2025) and TzAR: Pixel Art Anthology (The Blasted Tree, 2025) (as well as a mound of chapbooks), with the latest full-length title being The Wiki of Babel (Calgary AB: University of Calgary Press, 2026). […]

I’ve always considered the best kind of writing one that allows a collision between unexpected words, sounds, ideas or structures; one that allows, through that collision, the pure elements of the poem to form in the reader’s own comprehension of those collisions, and Flemmer’s The Wiki of Babel is an ambitious assemblage of the multiple languages of the Biblical Tower of Babel (in which a scrabbling group were struck by G-d to speak in multiple different languages, thus no longer being understood by each other, therefore seeming to all speak in a “babble”) and the wealth of information shaped and collected and hyperlinked across Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (and this title reminds me that Vancouver poet Rob Manery had been working on a hyperlinked poem/poem project back in the mid-1990s, which makes me wonder whatever happened to that, if it ever saw completion). Organized into cluster-sections, Flemmer’s engaging, delightful and playful collection of collage-lyrics is structured via sections “Suggested languages,” “Alternate histories,” “Current events,” “Community portal” and “Canadian hypertext,” the final of which includes some fun explorations through language via Canadian classic novels, including Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers (1966), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), Marian Engel’s Bear (1976) and Margaret Laurence’s The Diviners (1974). 

rob mclennan, Kyle Flemmer, The Wiki of Babel

I’ve spent the month of June reading The Intentions of Thunder by Patricia Smith – an amazing poet who I was lucky enough to meet and hang out with at the Cork International Poetry Festival recently. This new and selected from Bloodaxe does a brilliant job of giving a sense of the range and development of Patricia’s work over the course of ten collections of poetry – enough to give you a real sense of the development of her poetics over the years, whilst leaving me wanting to buy each individual collection (not good for my bank balance!). The Intentions of Thunder also won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2025, which as far as I know is a rarity for a New and Selected. She has more accolades to her name than I can write here – you can read more about her and her work here…

I do think you need to read Patricia’s collections to get a real sense of the kind of poet she is, and preferably one after the other. I wish I’d found her work whilst I was researching for my PhD. There I was, trying to work out how to write about female desire and sexism and masculinity and whether poetry can create social change – and Patricia has been doing all that work (and more!) for decades, getting (as Danez Smith says on the back cover of The Intentions of Thunder) better and better with every book.

The Intentions of Thunder draws from many of her collections, starting with Life According to Motown, published in 1991 and finishing with Unshuttered, published in 2023. One of my favourite poems in the collection is the first poem “What It’s Like to Be a Black Girl (For Those of You Who Aren’t). It begins

first of all, it’s being 9 years old
and feeling like you’re not finished, like
your edges are wild, like there’s something –
everything – wrong.

Each book feels more like an album than a poetry collection – each one has its own identity, its own stage of development. Patricia has prefaced each book here with a short prose introduction which kind of tracks her development as a poet, her sense of her own poetics.

Kim Moore, June Reading Diary

In the hard moments of hard days, my three-year-old curls herself away and sings to herself, to the walls, to me, to the shadows listening: “It’s so hard…to [be a] big girl…” It’s a song in the lineage of the Kangaroo song, one I made up for moments like these, a recent iteration of “Why is the baby so very mad?” and “She’s so fierce, with her two teeth.” I have been giving her these nonsense spells since her birth. I have chanted them to her, changing the lyrics at whim, and to suit her moods and requests. She doesn’t mind my voice, doesn’t question or pull from it: It’s so hard to big girl—sing it Mommy.  And by all that’s holy, I do. How has this little child so easily broken open the heart of my poetic wound?

As a young poet, I composed countless lines of sonorous words in delightful and tragic patterns with little semantic sense. As antiquated language faded from the codex of my writing, new voices made their way in, and with them an understanding of what happens when phonemes become morphemes, when morphemes become words—signifier and signified, and now we have meaning. Where before there was sound as somatic truth, now it was a doorway from my body to the larger world. Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” and its proto-Siri voice reciting poetry to the house’s absent inhabitants, formed the first tether between my psyche and living writers. A few years later, as if in echo of Bradbury, out from the mystic, I heard Robert Hayden ask, “What did I know / of love’s austere and lonely offices?”—and suddenly, poetry gave voice (and blessedly, contrast) to the “chronic angers” that surrounded me.

O questionable confessional poetry in halting lines and the call of an open mic —I was fearless on the slam stage—the one poetic venue that wants to hear you. But this was not my place either. My scratchings were steeped in outdated verse, a locked doxology (for ever and ever, amen), and the primal vocal patterns fueling my writing were in direct conflict with my desire to be understood. Up to this point, I hadn’t considered what it meant to be a poet in a world where only the likes of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen might write like this—“too street” for the page and “too heady” for spoken word—and I didn’t have a guitar to tender that connection.

So I did what any cloistered poet would do: I looked to contemporary masters for a new vernacular (Adrianne Rich, Philip Levine, Lee Young-Li among them), begged them to discipline my writing out from song and into narrative. I prostrated myself at the feet of Anne Lamott, Stephen King and Richard Hugo. For every fast, I would swear off Kalevala and Sir Gawain. Let me be narrative, O lord. Renew a right spirit within me. But I found instead Matthew Francis, Brenda Hillman and Michael Ondaatje. The fractured storytelling in House of Leaves and Cloud Atlas, and all the sundry works of Catherynne Valente.  I played Counting Crows on repeat.

From This Body—Music, guest post by Sherre Vernon (Trish Hopkinson)

I’m wrestling these days with having my silence stolen. Silence in the sense that Umberto Eco talks about in his essay on censorship which I mentioned in this post. Remember his call to: Redi in interiorem hominem? The digital noise as a drug is something I know I need to address for myself, for my mental health. As a first step I had this idea to cull my instagram — to unfollow those accounts that have been inactive for over a year. I’m shocked/notshocked by how many accounts that I followed that were inactive for two years plus. It appears the smart kids did a mass exodus (went dormant) about January of 2024. My other step has been to adopt the idea of a half-sab or half sabbatical from social media. Instead of having just one day off per week, I am going to try to take several days away. I mean, duh. Lastly, I’m trying to make my home email a sacred space. So I’ve unsubscribed to almost everything, bookmarking sites instead, old school. Who knows, maybe that’s not the answer either, but I’m wondering if emailing friends isn’t the way to go? […]

So I was re-reading (and need to go deeper) The Wasteland by T.S.E. And this is a good guide for it. I have been attending to the idea of the fragment, and so: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” is worth thinking about. And then the ending is the Aum Shanti chant which I once found useful and might again, particularly the Aum in all the things.

Shawna Lemay, Whose Silence Are You?

Two notes I’m taking from this autopsy, both about openings.

First: where an opening reaches for abstraction, the thing it should have entered through is often waiting one or two lines below. In Prayers it is line three: the cancer. I’ve gone back through a handful of my own drafts since seeing this, and the same shape keeps recurring — the first lines perform the mood, then a later line, often unforced, names what the mood was about. The repair is almost always the same. Cut the performance. Begin where the seeing begins.

Second: a single feeling-noun — tears, fear, grief, longing, loss — can carry an opening if the surrounding image earns it. Three in the first stanza is the diagnostic threshold. The poem has stopped showing and started naming. In Prayers, tears recurs three times across the first seven lines, and prayers arrives twice more after that. The recurrence isn’t motif. It is the same reach repeating, in lieu of the thing the poem is trying not to look at.

Adam Cairns, Two lines reached for tears. The cancer was one line below.

Has this ever happened to you? You’re writing, you’re into the flow, hearing all these words/voices/words/phrases/words/words/words, and then it just won’t stop?

I wrote this poem a few years ago after a terrifying episode that happened one afternoon. I had been writing poems and I couldn’t turn off the flow. The flood of voices, words, and phrases overwhelmed me. I was afraid I was psychotic.

I don’t know if it lasted 5 mins or an hour. I don’t know if anything has ever terrified me more. It only happened this one time, but I have been vigilant ever since. I didn’t write poems or lyric prose for a few years. Then I took a chance and started a Substack. It has helped bring me back. Thank you for reading here. […]

“Sam is standing over Jessie they
threw buckets of spinners absurdly
small a staircase in his mouth in all that
never a one their umbrellas rain
falling rain falling everywhere upwards of twenty
back forty the pink birds
shifted the church doors are locked
now nebulous”

I cannot make it stop.

“star candies five and ten
ways to cross the waste listen
Johnny the boss is soft ice too the back room they will
Judy, did you hear a sound?
the tree branches caught every child under
five is in an excellent
we were all at riverbanks and”

I cannot make it stop.

Surely I am damned.
I tell you,
this is hell.
Do not leave me in it.

Rebecca Cook, What Happens When You Can’t Turn Off The Flow?

In May I taught a week-long class: Taking Flight: Travel Poetry of Humans and Birds in a French castle complete with swimming pool and winery. The estate overlooking a working vineyard also held a small chapel, some fountains, and wooded paths. For one luscious week, we lived like royals with our own award-winning chef and a concierge who attended to our every need. Within days, this was our new normal.

There were so many things I loved about the castle—writing from new prompts every morning, a different room for each time of day and even a turret.

But most of all I loved the kindness present everywhere. The 9 women who came with me showed a willingness to leap into whatever crazy idea I came up with (“here’s a castle treasure map—go!”) and to look after each other with love and gentle attention. There’s so few experiences in my life that live up to the fantasy in my mind—but this week with no other tasks but to write poetry, swim, and eat freshly prepared French food—was a fantasy come true. At the end of the week, each poet wrote to me that they felt thankful for the experience which far exceeded their expectations. That’s all I needed!

Susan Rich, Sometimes Fantasy and Reality Actually Rhyme

The last time that I wrote, I was anticipating my talk at Bawtry Library as part of the Bawtry Festival. I promised to tell you how I got on. What I hadn’t anticipated was doing the writing from a chair at the side of my hospital bed. Ohh cruel fate. One minute you are a successful poet, dropping pearls of wisdom, regaling audiences with tales of your brilliance and experiences in the literary world, the next you are staring death in the face. Well, not exactly. I don’t think that kidney stones come with a high mortality rate, and with a bit of luck I shall be discharged in a day or two. But they bloody well hurt when they are doing their thing in the dark domain of your kidneys. And when the agony is upon you, thoughts of the sweet release offered by the grim reaper are of some comfort. Then again, the release offered by hospital strength pain relief is even sweeter.

Anyway, if I do perish through this current affiliation, at least I will have gone out on a high. I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too loudly, but my Bawtry appearance was a resounding success. Actually, I don’t think that the trumpet sounds outrageously loudly when the resounding success happens to be speaking to an audience of just over twenty in a small branch library in the outskirts of Doncaster. Particularly when a proportion of them were from my own family. But what the hell? I can be anything that I want to be and the majority of the audience were not family, and I had not even met many of them previously. Nobody walked out in disgust, nobody fell asleep, and the response was very favourable. I am a literary giant of the local library scene… In Bawtry. [..]

When I told Judy, my wife, that I had chosen twenty [poems], her first reaction was not encouraging. Twenty??? I stuck to my guns, figuring that I could always drop some if it wasn’t going well. In fact in the hours between selecting the twenty and the start of the gig, I flitted between panicking that twenty was far too many and panicking that I would run out of material inside the first half hour.

In the end, I delivered two 40 minute sets almost to the second. And all was well. I was a little bit technical, explaining the joys of writing in iambic pentameter, but that seemed well enough received. I even read a few stanzas of The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe, so that my version The Budgie could be delivered in context. Again, well received. I ranted about Meadowhall, Ikea and Tescos in a section on shopping, I talked about what my dad has been up to since he died in a section on my dad, which I intersected with a section on death. People listened, laughed where appropriate, and applauded. I even managed to sell a few books at the end. There is honestly no other way to describe the evening than as a resounding success.

Mike O’Brien, Pride Comes Before a Fall

My best beloved is very, very fond of all things tech, and especially the equipment of live and recorded sound. We own lots of it, and for many years he, or we, schlepped it to various venues to run live sound boards for church services or poetry readings, or to record the concerts of musician friends. These days we don’t have the stamina for such jobs, and the tech is used for recording poems, as seen above. But here’s a poem in praise of the stuff and the marvelous sounds it preserves.

Microphone Litany

for John, sound guy

Wacky and various though they are, I praise them:
The sort shaped like metallic ice-cream cones
(sturdy, utilitarian, everywhere)
along with the wand-like, pricey as small cars.
The impossibly tiny, glued unseen against cheeks,
tucked into wigs or hair
(their wires always succumbing, always demanding repair).

Dangled from ceilings on squint-invisible strings
or on booms, swaying in acrobatic danger,
hung at distressing heights from spindly stands,
swaddled in foam against windy buffetings
or strung up in weird cat’s cradles of rubber bands—

I praise them all and their magic, which lets me loll in bed
and summon a peal of bells in Normandy
or an ache of countertenor, ages dead. […]

Maryann Corbett, On being married to Sound Guy

I didn’t plan to do a poetry reading on the same day as a concert, the two being 100 miles apart. But I’m so glad it all worked out, because both events were terrific. Ver Poets are a really welcoming group, and hats off to the twenty-five or so people who came out on a very hot day to sit in a very hot room and listen to me and Mark Fiddes. Speaking of Mark, he’s a poet I’ve admired for a long time, despite the fact that he’s just a bit too successful at competitions. I wish he’d take a break and give the rest of us a chance – ha ha. I interviewed him a while back on Planet Poetry – listen to it here. Anyway, we got a preview of his new book Hotel Petroleum (Broken Sleep) hot off the press – actually the launch reading this this coming Thursday. He gave a great reading, and there was a nice Q & A/ chat in which we both chewed the cud a bit with the audience about the podcast, competitions, getting published and the like. Followed by a short (and I have to say high quality) open mic. A really receptive group, and I was delighted with my book sales. Huzzah.

Robin Houghton, Various news & musings, from Mozart to Billy Ocean

Ah, summer. Historically, not the best season for writing as far as I am concerned. The garden, yard, and outdoor activities tend to take precedence over sitting with a notebook or in front of a screen. Sending out or revising work gets shunted to rainy days, or to days so blisteringly hot and humid that I’m forced to stay indoors with the dreaded air conditioner going. So it is a bit out of the ordinary that I have participated in not one but two online poetry workshops this June. And they were worthwhile.

First was a workshop sponsored by One Art online magazine (Mark Danowsky and Louisa Schnaithmann, editors) in which Erin Murphy read, defined, and gave examples of demi-sonnets, a form of her own invention. She discussed using the form and offered suggestions for revising poems using the demi-sonnet; she had us writing to a prompt and revising one of our longer drafts to “fit” into a 7-line stanza–an excellent practice for learning to be more concise. The practice is fun and was useful to me. I had already tried my hand at demi-sonnets and at 7-line poems, but using the process and form for revision was enlightening. Readers, you must check out her work! She has published lots of poetry collections.

Later in the month, Lesley Wheeler‘s “Poetry from the Underworld” was a 3-hour online workshop sponsored by Sara Ann Winn of Poet Camp. I’ve been a fan of Lesley’s work (and of Lesley herself) for some time now, and thus jumped at the opportunity to attend a workshop with her. Wheeler had us explore the variety of ways we can consider the Underworld and write about it, or use the concept as a starting or ending point (or metaphor) for our work. Think about it: Hell, Persephone, Inanna, spelunking, oceans, tunnels, subways, archaeology, burrows, mycorrhiza, drilling, depressive episodes, digging, death, Sigmund Freud, the unconscious. Yes, the possibilities are nearly endless for poets.

She then covered quite a few revision process options and let us hear how her poem “Sex Talk” developed; a moving, personal, and craft-based discussion that all of us learned from, I think. Kudos and gratitude.

Ann E. Michael, Workshops

People you meet yearly or every 2 or 3 years, as with a haiku group, feel connected. It’s a slow-motion relationship but founded on commonality. Of all the people that exist, these are you people, also interested in books, reading, writing, nature, and of those, in poetry. Of that subset, interested in short forms, within that, in haiku, within that, a particular subset of English Canadian haiku that is playful and flexible. And of those, not too shy to talk with people and share their poems.

What is community? It’s a choice to come together. It’s a group gathered for photos with people chanting my name to join them– that happened at the Haiku Canada Weekend in Kingston last week. It touched something in me. Unambiguous welcome as being a part of an us. Something one step more than people lighting up and running over with hugs. A reunion with the haiku family. It does the heart good.

her rare tight hug—
orb weaver’s egg sac
carried high

Pearl Pirie, Community of Choice

All afternoon I wandered the croft looking at wildflowers and wallowing in the joy summer brings. An orchid extravaganza has been playing out across the fields. There are so many this year – much greater numbers of familiar blooms, and some new species. I don’t understand why. It could be any combination of strange weather patterns, croft management, luck or other phenomena. My notebook is full of questions to ask people who know about these things.

In one patch I counted 23 Lesser Butterfly orchids (Platanthera bifolia). From two individuals recorded a few years ago, LBs have spread right out across the croft, down onto the flood meadows and over the river. They are delicately, beautifully pretty, with creamy white flowers, each one winged like an angel. At dusk a rich perfume is released attracting specific long-tongued pollinators such as Elephant Hawk Moths. The orchids also have a special relationship with another group of organisms. Fungi families, with interesting names such as Ceratobasidiaceae and Sebacinaceae, invade an orchid by creating microscopic coils in root cells. They help seed germination and then provide newly growing orchids with carbon, phosphorus, and nitrogen.

These symbiotic relationships between orchids, fungi and insects are vital, and evidence of the complex webs of life which underpin all aspects of the natural world. The abundance of orchids on Red River Croft tells me our soils, fungal networks and insect communities are in good health. Such remarkable inter-species partnerships are one of many in nature but there are other factors at work here. The croft is managed – lightly grazed then cut for hay in late summer, well after orchids and other flowers have been pollinated and their seeds dispersed. Nature’s bonds have developed alongside people, grazing animals, management and machinery. Here, they’re flourishing.

In the Highlands, scientists view orchids as ecological linchpins and important bio-indicators of long-established biodiverse habitats. In rare or fragmented ecosystems such as peatbogs, machair, heath and Caledonian pine forests, orchids promote as well as signify the complex webs which sustain much wider floral and insect diversity. If orchids are present, so too are fungi and insects. They in turn provide support for birds and other species. This is also the case in crofted landscapes but only when they are free from herbicides, fungicides, insecticides.

I knew little about orchids until they began to pop up on the croft. For a few intense weeks in June they feature in my dreams and thoughts. Orchid fever dreams, excited, hopeful, full of flamboyant colour. Perhaps they come because I saw none as a child. The industrialised old town of my youth was not conducive to plants which need clean air, water and uncontaminated soil with healthy micro-communities of fungi, insects and other organisms. So I go out every day, an excited child looking for treats, to see if any more orchids have emerged.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, Orchid dreams

This week […] marked the 24th anniversary of my first date with Kath. It was a blind date and one I am delighted I went on. I have a couple of poems about that very evening and it felt good to take one of them to the bandstand stage at Oswestry Pride at the weekend as part of my set. It was my third time reading at the event and it felt good at the end of a very hot week to be taking the cool breeze of poetry to the park. Because I wear reading glasses, I can’t always see the people in the audience clearly, and because it’s a park it wouldn’t be possible for me to see the people standing further away anyway, but what I can feel is which poems land particularly well and I’d say this one did. […]

Your hair
your skirt
your make-up
your eyes straight ahead
told me
you were out of my league.

Then that fumble of fingers
had the coin falling from your grip.
Your one flaw was all I needed to say my name.

Sue Finch, FINDING THE BREEZE

I write the words down on a sheet
of paper and they terrify me. And I think
of how the lady next door has let her
jasmine grow on a bamboo arch that
I pass under before I reach her door
and the scent or the possibility of scent,
softens my footsteps and uncreases
my forehead and I get to her, somehow
open to earth and sky and welcome.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Stalled

Thus week: Tranströmer’s ten thousand insect wings, the high shriek of a nightjar, moving at summer’s pace, an animal made of departure, and much more. Enjoy.

I can’t let the longest day of the year pass by unmarked. In the winter, I like to bake something citrusy and light a candle, trying to summon back the sun, but I spent the last solstice in the emergency room, tethered to a heparin drip while souls in assorted types of agony cried out—literally—all around me. Talk about the longest night of the year. This morning I walked under the midsummer trees, listening to chickadees and catbirds and great crested flycatchers and Tranströmer’s ten thousand insect wings, so maybe I’m ready to call it even with the universe. It’s good, you know, to be here.

Vanessa Stauffer, “Every Riven Thing” by Christian Wiman

Salmonberry bubbles
of sweet red light
break on our tongues.
Shooting stars
in the flowerbeds,
pollen in our sheets.

Sharon Brogan, Summer Solstice

We’ll stay up
late, light lingering
the first day
of summer,
til fireflies flash the seconds
before bedtime’s hour.

*
Notes

A shadorma is a poetic form of one or more 6-line stanzas, each of which comprises 3 / 5 / 3 / 3 / 7 / 5 syllables per line, respectively.

Maureen Doallas, Solstice

longest day
a fly through the front door
exits the back door

Jim Young [no title]

Watching the 1971 movie of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with my children recently – a VHS favourite of my own childhood and far better than the clangorous Depp/Burton remake – I was struck by something in the dialogue I somehow hadn’t properly noticed before. Interesting to note that although Roald Dahl is credited with writing the screenplay for the film based on his own story, apparently he didn’t come up with the goods promptly enough and the American screenwriter David Seltzer was called in to complete the script, including much of the dialogue. […]

It’s in Gene Wilder’s ludic, ambivalent portrayal of Willy Wonka that Selzer’s dialogue really shines through. The element which surprised me in my recent viewing was the sheer number of literary references the film contains: Wonka’s exchanges with the children and their families are studded with lines of English poetry which invariably operate as puzzling non sequiturs, flummoxing the nosey vulgarity of the parents. I won’t list all the allusions here but, for example, there are half a dozen allusions to Shakespeare, including “Springtime, the only pretty ring time” from As You Like It, “Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?” from The Merchant of Venice and, in the remarkable final scene, “So shines a good deed in a weary world” (slightly twisted from “naughty world”, again from Merchant of Venice).

There’s also Keats’ “A thing of beauty is a joy forever” (the opening line of Endymion); a line from the anthology piece Sea Fever by John Masefield, “All I ask is a tall ship and a star to sail her by” and even an Oscar Wilde bon mot from The Importance of Being Earnest, “The suspense is terrible. I hope it lasts.” Also in keeping with the film’s comic bravura is a line from Ogden Nash, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker” (in fact this is a whole four-line poem entitled ‘Reflections on Ice-Breaking’).

In the strange levity the film left me with, I began to see Willy Wonka in a different light. Rather than just the playful, eccentric ringmaster of the Chocolate Factory, the fanciful inventor of his own enclosed world and its fantastical confectionery, (even the trickster and conjuror emphasised in the recent Timothee Chalamet off-shoot Wonka), could he be read as a poet-figure in himself, a Wildean dandy as his velvet purple suit and frilly cravat might suggest? Suddenly the song which Wonka croons when the children and their parents first enter the Chocolate Room – “Come with me, and you’ll be/In a world of Pure Imagination” – took on a new resonance. It seemed to link back to the Romantics and their worship of the Imagination and its transformative power, set against the mercantile, avaricious cynicism of the outside world. Wonka’s song is ushering his guests into a sphere of imaginative liberty and sensory blurring such as we discover in poetry, a polymorphic zone in which the harmful impacts of contemporary life on the children might be tested and challenged.

Could Wonka even be seen as a Virgilian guide escorting Charlie and the others through an underworld whose circles embody four (if not Seven) of the Deadly Sins, with each child receiving the “poetic justice” appropriate to their vice – Gluttony (Augustus Gloop), Pride (Violet Beauregarde), Greed (Veruca Salt), Sloth/Wrath (Mike Teavee). The nightmarish ‘Boat Ride’ sequence sees the hallucinogenic magic of the Chocolate Room suddenly veer into a bad trip, perhaps prefigured by the earlier song ‘Candy Man’ with its familiar 70’s drug hint. The speeded-up boat ride seems like a spiralling catabasis, that descent into the underworld which was a recurrent trope in ancient mythology, notably in the myth of the archetypal poet Orpheus when he ventures into Hades. The lyrics of the song creepily intoned by Wilder hint at this interpretation – “Are the fires of Hell a-glowing?/ Is the grisly reaper mowing?”

Some further lines of poetry recited by Willy a little later not only seemed remarkably familiar to me, they also reinforced this sense of the narrative momentum of the film revolving around counterbalancing forces of, on the one hand, poetry and imagination, and on the other, moral transgression and penitence. “We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams”. Where did I know this from, was it Wilde again – surely something from the 19th century?

Oliver Dixon, The Music Makers

Almost every night, I walk. The darkness and I are familiar with each other; I meet it on my own terms. With my headtorch on, the world is reduced to a circle of light. Sometimes I fall and no-one sees, no-one cares, though green eyes shine in the forest. Gate posts greet me like friends; sheep scatter as I walk. In the darkness, yarrow and ox-eye daisies shine. The wild ponies feed through the night; they barely glance in my direction. A curlew is sleepless; over the sound of my podcast, an owl. There are foxgloves lining my path to home.

Exercise:

What taste is Monday? Which tree has the kindest personality? What shape is your anxiety? What texture is thunder?

Clare Shaw, Neurodivergent in Nature

It was the flapping
of loose shingles and the high shriek of a nightjar
from dusk to dawn. A tangle of sweet potato vines
crept toward your feet as if to say You think
your grief is original but what do you really know
of how things learn to sweeten in the dark?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

In the last few days, I MC’d a reading at J. Bookwalter in Woodinville for their Wine and Poetry series, with poets Catherine Broadwall and Deirdre Lockwood, a local oceanographer. It was warm and sunny (you can tell I’m wearing sunglasses because there was so much glare inside!), but it was a good night AND Glenn did his first ever open mic performance, which I wish I had recorded, where he recited John Berryman’s Dream Song 14. I realized he is a better public speaker than I am, lol.

We also tried a real birdwatching trek because someone had posted about seeing a Lazuli Bunting at a local park. So, forgetting I don’t do well in heat, or sun, or, let’s face it, outdoors with hills and a lot of brush and non-paved pathways, we went on an adventure to a well-known birding trail at Marymoor Park. Despite wearing long sleeves, long pants, shoes and socks, plus sunscreen and two kinds of insect repellent, I still got attacked by a tick on my wrist while I was taking a shot (brushed it off within ten seconds, but still managed to leave a bite behind that required a doctor visit) and a black fly (which I am allergic to), so after an hour, I had to call it quits. It felt like nature had personally attacked me and told me I was an indoor cat, and keep to my own space, lol. On the birdwatching side, we saw about forty Great Blue Herons fly right over our heads, I saw Purple Martins and Tree Swallows and Yellowthroats, and multiple pairs of Lazuli Buntings (which is my first time ever seeing this dream bird). Oh, and did I mention my three-year-old Sony camera’s motherboard went out WHILE we were taking pictures? I didn’t get as many good ones, but it was still fun to see those birds.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Happy Solstice! A New Poem in Crab Creek Review, Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, Birdwatching as Contact Sport, Cyclical Economic Misery

Turkey became the second team to be eliminated from the World Cup this week after registering a record sixty two shots on goal without scoring any of them. This, I regard, as a spectacular achievement, for it represents the endeavour of the poet. The very best of us do not concern ourselves with hitting targets or clocking up points or reeling away to an adoring crowd after sending a sonnet sweetly into the top corner. Some of us try overhead kicks and fall flat on our arses, others fail even with a simple tap-in, can’t manage, in endless attempts, to slot that last line home. We miss the wide open goal, don’t know where or sometimes even what the goal is. So bravo Turkey, bravo for shooting and missing and shooting again. Bravo for those sixty two attempts without finding the net. Bravo for not being the first but the second team to exit. We poets are not in the results business, we are in the business of scuffing the turf, of hoofing long balls up the park, we are in the business of vague and hopeful shots in the dark because there is more to poetry, much, much more to poetry than just winning cups.

Jan Noble, N°69 Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diiie

Worlds collide all the time.  This past weekend, it was Jewish poets at the Yetzirah Poetry Conference in the Blue Ridge Mountains doing their poetry hootenanny alongside hundreds of ROTC kids shouting theirs. It was Jesus Freak! JC rocks!, a Christian camp retreat with snaking lines of African-American kids in identical T-shirts.  

It was bears with their hulking, early-morning shadows at the garbage. It was yes, ma’am and no ma’am.  It was the delicate mourning of one poet’s lines about her single plate and single egg while one single syllable (Rah! Go! Sir! Shun!) uttered by hundreds of thundering voices.  It was the war machine alongside the poet machine.  It was a twilight shriek that brought me to the ill-fitting screen window to witness the violence of a hyena and a dog, a raven and a mouse, what turned out to be the other animal in their rituals of lethal bloodletting.  It was Jewish poets wrestling with unholy bloodletting. 

It was poets on a mission to speak through and in the context of ancient values, in the poetry of Song of Songs, of humanism, of universal values. A tradition that bases itself on multiple points of view, on those voices arguing, dialoging, constantly confronting and refining each other is a tradition we must put forward.  It was our own scratching itches. It was a world where a sweet Asian intern at the YMCA’s coffee bar asked, “You one of the Jewish people? What do you say? – oh yes, Shalom!” It was an easy Shabbat Shalom, y’all.  

Jill Pearlman, Yetzirah, ROTC & Jesus Camp

It’s done. I have completed running. Yesterday saw me tick off the last stage (I think) of my midlife crisis (sort of wish I’d got into affairs and motorbikes) by running 53K across some hills as part of the Race To The King Ultramarathon. I am in awe of anyone that started and/or finished any of the races happening yesterday. Some absolute loons were doing 100K. […]

[L]ast night after we’d got home (and thanks to my beloved wife for coming to pick me up from Chichester), I was continuing my read of Tobias Hill’s Collected Poems while sitting in bed waiting for my legs to stop throbbing and for the painkillers to kick in.

I must confess to struggling with the book so far..I’m not sure if it’s the onslaught of a collected works that’s a bit much, some of if I’m just not connecting to, or if I’ve been distracted this week while reading it. I do intend to go back to some of it, but when I have connected I’ve really liked it.

Mat Riches, Running Up the (Tobias) Hills

Leave it to a sunny day to turn a boring chord progression into a bright war against imperialism.

A day that shimmers you pearl-promised, tranced in rays of purple unhazed, unfazed by the boom of doomsday’s drums.

Leave it to a sunny day to steam your third eye clean, to make you feel so far out you can hear the stars sneeze.

Rich Ferguson, An Eraser Big Enough for Misspelled Skywriting

I’ve just finally gotten around to reading Salman Rushdie’s memoir Knife, in which he writes:

…[A]rt challenges orthodoxy. To reject or vilify that art because it does that is to fail to understand its nature. Art sets the artist’s passionate personal vision against the received ideas of its time. Art knows that received ideas are the enemies of art…clichés are received ideas and so are ideologies…without art, our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die.

Art is not a luxury. It stands at the essence of our humanity, and it asks for no special protection except the right to exist. It accepts argument, criticism, even rejection. It does not accept violence. [Salman Rushdie]

There are others who’ve said this. I think immediately of Audre Lorde:

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

What makes a person really a writer, really an artist, is–in my mind–this quality of necessity. And of the right to exist, regardless of whether the nation, state, government, religion, or other ideology suggests that one ought to shut up. For many years, I questioned whether I was, or would ever be, “really a writer.” Now, I feel that I am. Regardless of what the academy, the current aesthetic, the powers that be might say. There’s a deep contentment that accompanies this feeling: somehow or other, I got here; it has little to do with publication or public acknowledgment, and even less to do with remuneration.

Maybe it’s age. (Crone wisdom, anyone?) So, for any of my readers who are younger people, by which I mean under 55, who feel like impostors or dilettantes or who question whether they deserve the title of “a serious writer,” I’m going to suggest that you keep writing and endure. And maybe stop asking yourself so many questions about your worth. You don’t have to be famous or acknowledged to be a writer, you just have to be dedicated to writing and to learning about writing. There’s value even in that, in looking hard at the “rock experiences” of your daily life and endeavoring to make something of those experiences. Stay curious, stay unorthodox.

Ann E. Michael, Not a luxury

Realistically I’m still very, very far away from the idealised life with its little house in the countryside and several books of published poetry and an income from writing that means I can choose when and how much I undertake socially demanding work (and yes there’s a whole other conversation here about how the journey is the destination, but I’m not going to get into that now). But where did me of a few years ago want to be?

She wanted a job, any job that meant she could pay the bills; she wanted to work in a climbing wall because she thought it would be fun and didn’t know then that she’s AuDHD and a socially demanding role would take it’s toll; she wanted to get into route-setting; she wanted to publish more poems; to get a first in her undergrad and get on to an MFA; to move out of a terrible, terrible house-share that made her miserable; she wanted a car; she was lonely socially and romantically; she wanted to be able to climb 7b; she wanted to get out into the poetry scene and start building a career…

I work at a wall, I route set, I climb 7b, I’ve had a few more poems published, I got a first in my undergrad, I’m doing an MFA, I live in a friendly house-share in a better part of town, I have some great friends who I see here and there, I have a wonderful and supportive partner who’s caring and kind and aware of my capacities and boundaries and meets me where I’m at, I go walking and birdwatching when I can and those things fill me with joy, I run this Stack and over 100 people find enough value in what I do here to subscribe to it, I host The Space Poetic and The Poetry Book Club and a series of workshops and clubs and there’s joy and community in all of them…

I am living exactly the life a previous me wanted so badly.

Rachael Hill, Opening up the timeline

Hard to build anything 
these days but golden calves and temples 
to avarice. Like Lot’s wife, I’m tempted 
to look back, but ahead is a small rabbit,
crouched, ears low, still as stone.

Sarah Russell, February 2026

All in all the week was gentle and quiet. Joys included delivering copies of the group poem to the residents at the housing association, feeling physically better after a recent hysteroscopy, drafting poems about said procedure so that it is set down out of my head, finding out during a conversation with a friend that there might be an audience for said poems even though I thought they were possibly a bit niche, getting back out into the garden. […]

There has also been time for reflection and I have taken time to reflect on the same experience through two different lenses … the lens of poetry and the coaching lens. When I write confessional poetry I love the cathartic nature of the setting down and the rawness. I hear the words reflected back and see the human experience of the moment. When I think about the coaching lens I think about the helpfulness of the forward-thinking nature of coaching. How saying things out loud to a thinking partner can be far more productive than listening to the repeated thoughts of an internal voice. Saying things out loud in a coaching space helps with a more efficient and proactive untangling of thoughts, feelings and behaviours. It was the coaching lens that enabled me to swap months of dithering for minutes of action. And it’s the poetic lens that lets me set down the experience for others to read.

Sue Finch, A SLIGHTLY BLURRED MIDSUMMER RONNIE

I’m teaching a three-hour virtual workshop on underworld poetry next week, preparing in bits and pieces as I carve out time for new writing, news-reading, and visiting loved ones who are struggling through their own purgatories (and in some cases exiting triumphant–my sister has successfully divorced the toxic narcissist, and there are celebrations throughout the land). My hope is for real connection with other poets across the abysses that strand us. I love a seminar-style conversation about poetry: no small talk, just digging into what matters, which can range from the subjects themselves that engage us to poetic strategies that might carry a reader along. Whether what comes to mind is death and decay or transformation and emergence, underground spaces have weird power and potential.

Below (hah!) are a few of the poems I’ll share in the workshop–the ones that are readily available online, because living writers ought to be able to drive you to their books for satisfaction. Poets go to dark places, deliver treasures, and don’t get much love or money for that labor. I strongly recommend Deborah A. Miranda‘s books–her poems, such as “Mnemonic,” can be fiercely geological–and there are compelling caves and cenotes in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s new Night Owl. Here’s another good one in Amethyst Review: “Cloacina” by J. C. Scharl, whose work I don’t know at all otherwise, but it’s an appealingly filthy poem. I’d love to hear about the ditches and basements, bomb shelters and swimming pools that haunt you, if you’re able to join us on June 28th.

Even if not, enjoy the following subways, scuba dives, and bog archaeology of influential 20th century lyric spelunking.

Lesley Wheeler, Sneak preview of Poetry from the Underworld

I was fortunate to get my hands on an advance copy of Catherine Balaq’s new pamphlet, Some Dark God, which will be published by V Press on 3rd July.

As the title suggests, these poems are dark and chthonic – they get their hands mucky in the soil, pulling out all the blind, wriggling things to show us. Darkness here is a thing that attracts, intrigues and repels in one breath. It is the “very dark God who is watching you”, the “soul-thin drapes” of a widow’s kimono, the “kitchen sulk at parties”.

“A darkness lifting itself above, / leaving a darkness in its wake” (Ceridwen)

Catherine draws on Ceridwen and other mythological figures such as Persephone and Lilith to subvert notions of power, shame and propriety. You do not need to know the full stories of these myths to understand that the speakers of these poems are speaking back, reclaiming narratives that have through history been denied to them.

I was interested in the pervasive feeling of unsettled-ness running through the work. Catherine knows how to work the darkness into us, like a splinter we worry at, while we read. There is an ambivalence to poems such as Witch Fingers that resists a neat interpretation;

broodish with thumb buckles, tucks of knuckles.
Touch me, neat-scratch me in ticking stripes,
pull me and push me down on my knees.

The sonic patterning is fidgety, jumpy, and the reference to “ticking stripes” has that kind of (dark) cottagecore feeling. Pretty things but with an undercurrent. Elsewhere, a “ditsy Liberty’s hanky” is used to pocket a rather frightening toad.

Victoria Spires, Seeing in the dark

Bennett’s book […] opens with a page of “acknowledgements & process notes” and a three-page list of “influences, references, & sources,” material usually held for the back of any collection. As Bennett’s “acknowledgments & process notes” includes:

Many of these are ‘found’ poems using text from various sources. We had originally set out to write about the divine shadow feminine but She will not be intellectualized, only embodied. As various illnesses took away my ability to use electronic devices & think & speak & write with coherency, She invited me to turn inward, dance deeper into Madness, & to use unconscious analog art-making methods such as cut-up, collage, & chance operations. &—although I don’t love this term, it smacks of the hospital, preferring instead to be divinely guided rather than operated upon—as adaptation.

The result is this rough beast before you.

Thank you for reading.

Assembled across three sections, each of which are constructed as extended lyric sequences that interconnect—“The Oxford Dodo vs. The Anatomical Venus,” “The New Bodily Ethos” and “Excavation of the Colossal Mother”—there is something interesting in how one might see Bennett’s prior engagement with the sonnet as attempting to find order within a particular kind of chaos. Through the use of found material set in collage, a different kind of order, Bennett works a lyric structure more overtly chaotic, or, more likely, one that allows for a coherence through the chaos itself. Working with, and not against, what Bennett’s own possibilities provide. And in which Bennett’s compositional approach evolves from composing a poem with one’s own material, to being able to discern where the poem might already exist, within that same material. The pastiche provides Bennett a way to think through their improvisations to achieve something entirely fresh. Or, as Bennett themlseves write, towards the end of the second section:

      I rise & become one
in new shapes

rob mclennan, Roxanna Bennett, We Gladly Feast on Those Who Would Subdue Us

It’s hard to think of a less fashionable English text than More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (except, I suppose, possibly Jonson’s Ars Poetica). More’s Dialogue endorses the most dreadful form of execution for unremitting heresy, and it’s written in a conversational form of English as it was spoken in the 1520s — there is no punctuation in the original apart from the virgule (/), which is more like a breath mark than modern punctuation. More than anything else, the dialogue is about speech — the power and danger and beauty of talking to one another — and about language as it is spoken, in the mouth and on the tongue, as it is chammed (‘chewed’, one of his favourite words) and corrupted and turned to wit or wisdom. It is one of the great love poems to the English language.

As he turns to consider the risks of translation into the vernacular, More makes a remarkable comparison between translation and the divine venture of the incarnation:

Whereof I would not, for my mind, withhold the profit that one good, devout unlearned layman might take by the reading [of scripture] — not for the harm that a hundred heretics would fall in by their own willful abusion; no more than our Saviour letted [refused] for the weal [benefit] of such as would be, with his grace, of his little chosen flock, to come into this world and be lapis offensionis, et petra scandali (1 Peter 2), ‘the stone of stumbling, and the stone of falling’ – and ruin to all the wilful wretches in the world beside.

Translating is risky and difficult; it never works perfectly and something is always lost. How far off it is! that state of grace. But on those rare occasions when a translation really works, how close to us it seems.

Victoria Moul, What is translation for?

Bill Lavender’s city of god is a kind of serial epic of our times that takes the form of a dialogue with St Augustine’s book of the same name in the translation of the Rev. Marcus Dods, M.A. In a Foreword, Lavender tells us that he started the work as a ‘spiritual exercise’, expecting City of God to be similar in nature to the saint’s Confessions. He was, however, to discover that it’s an entirely different kind of beast, ‘a viscous polemic delivered in a tone of cynical derision and condescending parody, reminiscent of the radical right-wing polemics we see in popular media today, like the (ostensibly) new movement of Christian Nationalism’.

To add to the effect, Lavender began the work on the 6th of January, 2021, with images of riot and pillage on the streets of Washington overlapping with similar scenes on the streets of 5th century Rome and the fact that Augustine was writing in Hippo, a city on the cusp of destruction. Unsurprisingly, the work that emerged folds a good deal of politics, current and historical, into its weave.

Billy Mills, city of god by Bill Lavender: A Review

In the six years I have been writing reviews, I have rarely encountered a collection of such epic ambition as Hadley-Jones Hoyles’ A Ministry of Light (The Candyman’s Trumpet, 2025). The collection focuses on three periods in the history of the ancient British territories we would now recognise as Northern England and Southern Scotland: 350 AD, 525 AD and 700 AD. These are eras of turmoil, upheaval and instability, in which competing tribes contest ownership and control of the land. Hoyles renders this world through anonymous period voices, in poems whose cadence, alliteration and use of kennings recall early medieval verse and lend those voices a persuasive sense of authenticity. Although the collection is rooted in the distant past, it offers a resonant meditation on colonisation and its effects on communities, making it a work with considerable relevance for contemporary readers.

The subjugation of any community is a violent act, and this is vividly realised in Hoyles’ visceral verse. This is not a world shaped by diplomacy or mediation: relationships between competing tribes are determined by unchecked violence. In Eel at the deli counter, the poet presents a landscape strewn with the bodies of the fallen: ‘Breastplates scattered/ like shards of crab/ some tasty meats are clinging/ though them crows it seems/ have had first dibs/ I still have the option/ of Roman cheek/ or sun-dried Thracian liver.’ The image of the eel relishing the prospect of feeding on human flesh is arrestingly horrific, recalling the traditional ballad The Twa Corbies, with its bleak meditation on death, abandonment and the indifference of nature. The eel becomes a recurring presence in the collection: an immortal, detached consciousness that comments on centuries of change while moving between river, sea and land, and between different historical moments. In this poem, Hoyles uses the eel to symbolise nature’s indifference to human conflict. Violence becomes little more than a local disturbance within a larger, enduring natural order; the eel’s appetite gives that indifference a memorably brutal form.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘A Ministry of Light’ by Hadley-James Hoyles

Decades of film noir explain
how he dreamed himself—

pure Forties Bogart,
dinner-jacket suave, a cool
hand gesturing smoke,

a smolder censing
rooms thick with urbanity.
Struck from the film script:

his wife, his daughters
cleaning bathrooms, tasting ash.

Maryann Corbett, For Father’s Day . . .

“Eating Air” is a celebration of food and loving family connections. Du Bois has deliberately chosen a conversational, colloquial vocabulary that mixes Malay words and customs with English as a reflection of the poems’ messages. The use of food is not to separate but to combine and explore the possibility of new flavours and new traditions. A successful blend of mixed heritages.

Emma Lee, “Eating Air” Suyin du Bois (Emma Press) – book review

Zoë Walkington’s Missing Person (smith | doorstop, available here) was my reading matter of choice on trains to and from Leeds on Saturday. It’s ground-breaking: a mash-up of poetry pamphlet and police procedural detective fiction, in which we encounter suspects, and police investigators in a case of child abduction from an underpass in York. The reader is invited to read the poems and solve the case. I’m glad to report that yours truly did indeed crack the case. (No wonder I bought a copy of the complete Sherlock Holmes in the book sale at the Leeds Library.) The richness of Missing Person lies, though, in the details – I have to say ‘gritty’ details. ‘Black Gloves’ opens thus:

How much for these? I ask the bloke
behind the trestle, who looks like
he has just eaten his own young.
And he looks me up and down
and says Seven quid to you, and I say
I’ll give you three and he shakes his head
as though I’m asking him which of his
Alsatians he wants to have put down.

The (black) humour here will be recognisable to anyone who read Zoë’s marvellous I Hate to Be the One to Tell You This (smith | doorstop, 2023). I won’t spoil the surprise and cleverness of Missing Person any further.

Matthew Paul, Recent reading and an imminent reading

I have been saddened to learn of the death, early in May, of philosopher, writer, and professor at Penn State University — and a frequent contributor to this blog —  Emily Rolfe Grosholz.  (Here is a link to her informative obituary.)

In remembrance of Emily, here is the opening stanza of her poem “In Praise of Fractals” — posted in this blog at this link back in November, 2014.

Euclid’s geometry cannot describe,
nor Apollonius’, the shape of mountains,
puddles, clouds, peninsulas or trees.
Clouds are never spheres, 
nor mountains cones, nor Ponderosa pines;
bark is not smooth; and where the land and sea
so variously lie about each other
and lightly kiss, is no hyperbola.

from “In Praise of Fractals” by Emily Grosholz

This link leads to a list of citations of Emily Grosholz and her work in this blog.

JoAnne Growney, Sadness — Math Poet Emily Grosholz has passed . . .

In hindsight, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) appears as literary runner-up in the Great American Poetry Pageant of the 19th century. The crown, of course, belongs to Emily Dickinson (1830–1886), with whom Hunt, exactly the same age, had played as a child and became reacquainted late in both their lives. But although Hunt’s reputation has waned, as it might have done even absent the overshadowing fact of Dickinson’s genius, her poems, with their quiet innovations on received forms and their complicated interest in perception, continue to reward a reader’s attention.

Like the late sonnet “February,” from her posthumously published Calendar of Sonnets, Today’s Poem concerns itself with the natural world, but also with the human impulse to impose meaning on that world and then to read the world through that meaning. “Poppies on the Wheat,” which appears in Jackson’s first collection, the 1870 Verses, gives us an Italian landscape, in which poppies grow among the summer-burnished wheat, but its real subject is human perception.

The farmer, with his prosaically “heavy feet,” looks at the growing wheat and sees his harvest. The present holds no particular beauty for him, except as it foretells the prosperous future. The poet-speaker, by contrast, envisions a future in which, stripped of all other nourishment, she may sustain herself on the remembered beauty of the poppies, which promise no outcome except the memory of their beauty.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Poppies on the Wheat

Like all good poems, […] ‘The Trees’ [by Philip Larkin] grows richer when it’s read in relation to other poems. Those relationships, in turn, makes the ‘horror’ both easier to recognise and to digest. In the original piece, I talked about Tennyson, because I was reading Tennyson. Henry spots T. S. Eliot, and as Victoria Moul points out, that grief / leaf rhyme is everywhere in English poetry. There are, as so often in High Windows, ‘“furtive memories of once having enjoyed some French symbolist poetry” (for which see Jeremy Noel-Tod here).

Then again, we don’t even need to look outside of the book. Perhaps the most obvious companion poem to ‘The Trees’, is ‘Cut Grass’, which is placed towards the end of High Windows. Both poems are made up of three four line stanzas. Both are about the seasons: ‘Cut Grass’ picks up in ‘young-leafed’ June where ‘The Trees’ left off in May).

In other respects, as David Rees notes, they couldn’t be more different. ‘The Trees’ is argumentative, where ‘Cut Grass’ is pure image:

Cut grass lies frail: Brief is the breath Mown stalks exhale. Long, long the death It dies in the white hours Of young-leafed June With chestnut flowers, With hedges snowlike strewn, White lilac bowed, Lost lanes of Queen Ann’s lace, And that high-builded cloud Moving at summer’s pace.

This is so straightforwardly beautiful that I don’t think it needs much comment. But on we go all the same. There is an extended metaphor in the first few lines — grass as life and death — before the poem turn into a series of images, whiteness piled on whiteness. Larkin described the poem as ‘like music’ and said he heard a melody kicking in around line six. The chestnuts that were ‘unresting castles’ in May are simply flowers here. Nature isn’t threatening, perhaps because it’s dying.

‘Cut Grass’ is one of Larkin’s little Edens. The poem is steeped in an Englishness which is both nostalgic (those lovely ‘lost lanes’) and hierarchical: the lilac is bowing, the cow parsley has its folkish, regal name. In that sense, it is a deeply conservative poem, but the politics is itself in service of the poem’s deeper myth-making, which is more about coming to terms with ‘the changing of the seasons’ than submission to any kind of human order.

Jeremy Wikeley, The Trees, again

Poets have a very specific occupational hazard: the warped representation of ourselves that results from our shortfall in self-knowledge. The poem is, neutrally, the most self-conscious form of speech humans can make, and those shortfalls tend to manifest in the way our poems project our own neuroses. All poems are generally ‘revealing’ of their authors, and can be psychoanalysed. I love Sharon Olds, but I suspect her habit of relentless TMI disclosure and confession is partly there to shock her parents. In the late Cantos, I’d say Pound’s absurd who-is–the-smartest-poet–of-them-all shtick is manifesting a lifelong embarrassment over the extent of his own bluffed scholarship. I’m not sure the lad could really concentrate. There are drugs for that now. (Talking of drugs: Plath had no choice in her own terrible lie, that voice in her head which told her death was the only solution. She was unlucky to get landed with imipramine, an old tricyclic; it has the notorious side-effect of rapidly flipping the bipolar cycle from elation to psychotic plunge. It’s unbearably sad to think that today’s meds might have turned that voice off.)

To return to the subject of making it harder than it has to be – sue me, but I think late Geoffrey Hill suffers from an explicit projection of the class insecurity (British grammar school county scholarship variant) and terror of God that, despite all the alleged ‘jokes’, saw his compensating authoritarian fantasies run out of control. I think the idea was that we were supposed to be very afraid of him. (Late Hill gave full reign to his worst stylistic vice, namely melodrama: this had previously been reined in by the wise habit of slow composition, something his SSRIs had destroyed. One was pleased he was happier, as I was pleased to hear that X was now sober; but don’t force me to pretend it improved their poetry. Hill had always apparently pursued the dubious logic that to risk being easily understood was to risk simplicity, and to risk simplicity was to risk cliché, but his late work displayed a pretentiousness that could approach the inadvertently ‘Pythonesque’, in performances that forcefully implied that to fail to share his precise store of cultural signs – and therefore fail to follow the metonymic contraction this shared knowledge permitted – was to be a rube or a philistine. He was a quite extraordinary poet, but I saw few signs that he ever caught himself on. When I watch him read, I still see terrible, existential fear, and I want to hug the guy and tell him he’s not going to hell. Heaney was no less erudite, but he never bullied his readers to make himself feel better. Sorry; I’m only banging on about Hill as his best poetry means more to me with every passing year.)

OK: I think we can probably agree that this is more of an unethical parlour game. But ‘what is X getting wrong about herself?’ is as good a question to ask of a poet as of anyone else. It’s an especially good one for a poet to turn inwardly. We may all be liars, but we can’t tell an honest lie until we eliminate those we tell ourselves.

Don Paterson, POETS ARE LIARS

It’s officially publication day for White Winged Doves: A Stevie Nicks Poetry Anthology! Many thanks to my friend and co-editor, Megan Volpert, for going on this two-year adventure, Madville Publishing for agreeing to publish it, Donna Kile for incredible cover photography, and our stellar lineup of contributors. And, of course, to the original sister of the moon, Stevie Nicks, for inspiring us all.

If you couldn’t attend the virtual launch reading on May 26 – Stevie’s birthday! – hosted by the Georgia Center for the Book, you can watch it on YouTube by clicking the link below. [link]

Collin Kelley, Publication day and virtual launch video!

Excited to share that my new book – No Way Home – is now available on Amazon in the US and UK, in Paperback and Hardcover editions. Am sharing the links below for those who might want to check it out.

Can’t wait for you to read it! And to hear what you think of it!

US: https://www.amazon.com/No-Way-Home-Rajani-Radhakrishnan/dp/B0H3PKVBCC/

UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0H3PKVBCC/

It has been three long, anxious months from completed manuscript to this point. I think I am ready now to spend more time on the blogs – catch up on all that I’ve missed and start writing some new poems.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Now Available!

Some poets find it hard to accept a poor review. Luckily, I don’t suffer from this kind of thinness of skin. I’ve had plenty of negative reviews in the past for books, whether poetry or not, and have been called all kind of disparaging names for what I’ve written in newspapers, so I have long accepted that this stuff comes with the territory.

Of course I want people to appreciate and like what I write. If I didn’t think the poems were any good, I’d not have wanted them to be formed into a collection. A collection should reflect what you think is your best work at the time it was sent off for publication. But as I said, once I’ve committed them to print, while it does feel really good when someone likes them and says so, they’re subject to the free-for-all of opinion. Or, if it turns out to be the case, subject to an utter and brutal silence.

It’s no secret that I am part of no poetry ‘school’ or clique, nor do I want to be. I won’t be entering any competitions or hawking the book around ‘collections of the year’ awards because they don’t interest me. I suggest those who compile long-or short-lists of books look first for names they have heard of, then fill out the list, mostly from the more acceptable, longer-lasting, grant-aided publishers, and finally add in a few small press books as evidence of their open mind. While any publicity is good publicity, and if a book’s title is on a long-list, that does help with marketing, it seems a fairly tired model to me and the prize largely valueless. The poetry books I buy in a year have nothing to do with a poet’s reputation. I might open them in a shop, physical or online, be intrigued by a poem, and so buy it. Or in the past, have heard someone at a reading and have bought the book on the back of it. I won’t buy it, simply because it won this or that prize.

Bob Mee, IF YOU WOULD LIKE A REVIEW COPY OF POEMS IN THE KEY OF AARDVARK, PLEASE LET ME KNOW

From 1995 and my first book, to 2025, my seventh. Thirty years of putting poems together and hoping they make sense, make more of each other, at the very least offer a view of moments in time. 

This one has taken about seven years. Some have been quicker, but this book’s poems accumulated slowly and even at the last minute I was throwing some out. 

It starts with a quote about sewing, specifically mending. My life in sewing began at school when one of the first things we were taught was how to mend a sheet. That was the 1960s. Early days for consumerism. 

Fear and loss are also linked in this book. It’s impossible to write today without acknowledging the enormous environmental changes I’ve witnessed – the loss of stag beetles paired with news footage of the Vietnam war. The loss of flies paired with love. The loss of beetles paired with lifelong friendship. 

I write about money, trade, the price of meteorites. And then there are attitudes towards older women, so ageing is another topic that feeds into poems about fear and loss. In one poem I demolish a desk, in another I am cursed, in another I place an older woman at the centre of the language of money. 

None of my books have been tightly themed but tend towards the surreal. I want to understand, celebrate, dive deep into human interaction and attempt to expand specific moments with a different language to that of everyday conversation. But I hope a reader will recognise the language of everyday in my poems, as well as the assonance, rhymes, rhythms that may not be attached to specific forms, but which give it a different tone. 

In the last section of the book, Estuary, the poems come from the fluctuating self who is travelling between two places, the place where you might encounter a saint, a preacher, a memory of childhood, where you might, like a cat, be led by a sense of home, navigate by lullaby. Where you might find yourself in hiding for a night and a day and make the most of it. The book starts with mending, ‘the sea rebuilding reefs’ and ends ‘at the mouth of a river/ with water birds’. Always the sea, and that’s the influence of my city caught between a pebble beach and rolling chalk downland. 

Making the Wedding Dress is available from Salt Publishing for £10.99

Jackie Wills, A life of mending

The work has changed over the years, but every time I think something new feels vastly different, on re-read, it is still very much the same. I don’t hate this–if anything I’ve gotten cleaner, leaner, and meaner in poems. the language is more rhythmic and concise than what I was writing a decade ago. Two decades ago. Three decades ago, I was just finishing up my undergrad degree and writing terrible rhyming poems, so getting toward something good takes time.  

While I would say many of the same obsessions that fueled book number one have similarly fueled this latest book which I am putting the very final touches on as we speak,  I think I am doing them better justice. More sure-footed and intentional than the girl who used to throw things at the wall and see what would stick. But then there are also how the obsessions wax and wane. They feel more fictionalized now, with the series in MKK almost feeling like small stories and worlds placed alongside each other in the whole of the book. The NOLA vampire poems, the Bluebeard sequence, the governess poems. There were definitely books that felt like there was more of me, personally, in them–MAJOR CHARACTERS…felt very much like this. As did FEED and RUINPORN, though there may be the rather obvious reasons for this–both were bread out of a time when I was losing my parents, restructuring my life, and undergoing a lot of strangeness in the world. But I suppose just because the poems are about other people, that doesn’t mean I am not in there, rattling around like a rock in the shoe. 

And maybe, my thoughts on mid-careerness are not about the writing at all.  Things have changed greatly in the past decade on how I look at my work and strive to connect to readers. To find the best way to situate myself and my work in a way that seems right, even if it is not the usual, well-trodden path. What I’ve found there is immensely helpful when it comes to charting paths in new mediums. To look at the scope of the playing field and be able to decide what works for me, what doesn’t. What I want and what is not all that important. It’s a better state to feeling out the world in, and ill probably be far more satisfying than the years I spent tortuously pondering what kind of poet I wanted to be, what were the rules and punishments for disobeying them. It’s actually very freeing. 

Kristy Bowen, dispatches from midcareer poeting

My Plan A was to be a university professor with tenure. In California, when you teach at a university, you don’t wear elbow patches; you wear jeans and blazers. My father, whom I only met briefly, wore those patches, smoked a pipe. For real? I thought. I wanted to become one of those West Coast-type jeans-and-blazer professors. That was Plan A. But it didn’t happen. Maybe in the future. But I have never taught at USC or any of the UCs, outside of extension classes.

We recently published an author who teaches at a public university in California and makes $310,000 a year. I thought, That could be me. My family would be living well. I would have a nice house/kayak/dog/car, take vacations like la-di-da. I always feel like when you have more money, it’s easy to lean into saying smart things because you don’t have panic in your throat, and that’s a good thing. I can picture myself with a well-compensated teaching job, waxing eloquent.

Instead, I’m on Plan B.

Plan B is publishing. Making a choice to jump headfirst into instability, risk, and recklessness. People keep asking me what I’ll do if saving Red Hen doesn’t work, as if there is a Plan C. I think, Come on, these plans don’t run to Z. There’s just Plan A and Plan B.

I’ve thought about it, sure. I could live in Sri Lanka or Vietnam on five hundred a month, but that is not the plan and wouldn’t fulfill me. Failure is not in our future.

I have come to the conclusion that it’s also healthy to say, I can’t make it without help. Every single person who has stepped up to say I am here to help you, we are finding a way to honor their names. We want to remember who got us through this crisis. We want to remember that we have friends. That we are not alone.

Kate Gale, Walking Through the Moon Door

I’m lucky enough to have my own rowing machine, which we keep on our balcony during the summer months. The balcony looks out over two tall oak trees, leaning towards each other like old friends. As I row I watch squirrels chasing each other through the trees, leaping insouciantly from branch to branch to the accompaniment of a symphony of birdsong.

Meanwhile the display screen in front of me indicates the distance I’ve rowed, the time I’ve taken, my pace, stroke rate and even my heartbeat. At any instant I have a measure of my performance. 

Often I count along with the strokes, particularly when I am pushing myself towards the end of a workout. When I go to the gym I count too, lifting weights in sets of six or eight, and noting the number of breaths for which I can hold plank position.

This has led me to muse upon how numbers underlie our activities: whether we are counting rowing strokes, football goals, or tricks in a game of bridge; recording the distance we’ve cycled or driven; monitoring blood pressure; or marking birthdays on a calendar. We count the syllables in a haiku, the metrical feet in a pentameter, the notes in a musical scale. 

We (mostly) think in words or images, but numbers – in all their glorious variations, as sequences or patterns or absolute values – provide the unobtrusive ostinato of our lives.

I row. I watch squirrels and numbers, listen to birdsong, count strokes, and muse.  Sometimes my musings evolve into a poem.

Marian Christie, Musings

There were swifts over the rooftops last night — a low, screaming party of them, six or seven, scything the air above the lane in that way they have, as if the evening were a thing to be cut into ribbons. I stood at the gate and watched until the light went. They had come up from the south of the town, over the orchard, and they turned at the church and came back, and turned again, screaming the whole time, that high thin sound that is less a song than a kind of friction. I have been waiting for them since the first week of May, when one arrived and then was gone, and I half-thought I had imagined it. Now there is a colony of them, and the evenings have their proper noise. […]

A swift does not land. Not on the ground, not in a tree, not on a wire like the swallows. Once a young swift leaves the nest it may stay airborne for two or three years before it ever touches anything — feeding on the wing, drinking on the wing, gathering nest material on the wing, sleeping, it is thought, on the wing, climbing to a great height at dusk and dozing in slow circles through the dark. It mates in the air. By the time it first comes to rest, in the eaves of some building it has chosen, it has flown a distance that would have carried it several times round the world. We share our houses with an animal that is, in almost every sense that matters, made of departure.

And it is leaving us. The swift is on the red list now — the most serious category of conservation concern in Britain. The numbers have fallen by better than half in a generation, partly because the insects have thinned, partly because we have tidied and sealed and renovated away the small dark gaps under the roofline that they need. A bird that asks of us only a hole the size of a fist, and gives back the whole high theatre of a summer evening, is being quietly evicted by our improvements. I think about this when I watch them. The impermanence is not only in their season. It is in their tenure. […]

I have spent a fair part of these last years learning, slowly and against my inclination, not to grasp at things that are leaving. It does not come naturally to me. My instinct, when something good is plainly temporary, is to start grieving it while it is still here — to spoil the present arrival with the rehearsed loss. The swifts will not let me do that. They are too fast, too loud, too entirely in their six weeks of August-bound summer for any of that elegiac nonsense. They insist on the evening they are actually in.

That, I think, is what the solstice has to teach as well, if we will let the longest day be what it is rather than what we wish it were. The light is already turning. It has been turning, in fact, since before the swifts arrived; it will go on turning while they fly south. None of that is a reason to stand at the gate in mourning. It is a reason to stand at the gate. To watch the birds cut the evening into ribbons for as long as the evening lasts, and then to go in, and to let them go when their night comes, knowing they will lift off without ceremony and that the eaves will be silent by September.

Adam Cairns, The longest day

short pilgrimage…
some sun
in the side yard

Tom Clausen, illumination

This week: a ball and some grass, the uncertain horizon, ghost metaphors, the film of familiarity, and much more. Enjoy.

On this morning’s walk I stopped
to look at a shattered tree trunk
in a sunlit clearing in the woods,
the ground carpeted with fern and ivy,
an audience of light seeking trees
circling it, as if some kind of forest magic
had just happened there, some rite
or ceremony I had only just missed.

Whimsical? Or perhaps just imaginative?
All I know is, in that moment I was my own
blessing in the world, my own giver of gifts.
I must remember this. Stop. Look. Breathe.

Lynne Rees, Poem ~ Blessing

I am astounded by how much rest I need after a weary semester of teaching two Eng 112 classes on top of my normal work hours, fighting an English department’s compulsory AI use (anyone want some AI-generated sample essays in your course materials?!), publishing seven spring books at River River Books and bookselling at AWP, while parenting a tween and a teen and navigating relationships and small business taxes and—yes. All of it.

Conversation with my partner yesterday:

“I have been so exhausted.”

“It’s always like this for you, your first few days. You need to unwind.”

To resist means to soften into the powerful proposal of thriving right now. Of not waiting for permission from a toxic culture that blocks justice and moves from a spiritually deficient place. […] One day I hope we can all deprogram from the lie that rest, silence, and pausing is a luxury and privilege. It is not! The systems manipulated you to believe it is true.

Tricia Hersey, Rest is Resistance

The first full day of my residency was also the first day of my cycle, and the gift of only caring for my body on this day was just—oh, indescribable. I took naps. I read in bed. I took long walks in the pine woods. I ate half a melon on the veranda while reading more poems (Susan Briante’s new and selected 13 Questions for the Next Economy, rob mclennan’s The Sentence of the Book, Rest is Resistance—SO. GOOD! Also Sei Shōnagan’s The Pillow Book in the evening, and some Hildegard von Bingen while making coffee in the morning—variety is life!). I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016) in the evening while drinking wine in bed. I watched 12 deer in the evening field. I tried to write, and oh, it was not happening—the essay I planned on working on, the poem notebook. “The best thing you can do for your writing is something else,” I reminded myself. My first night, I started reading Charles Wright’s large collected (not complete) Oblivion Banjo, which daringly opens with “Homage to Ezra Pound.” I took a walk in the pine woods and was drenched by a downpour, despite the weather saying it wouldn’t rain—don’t trust technology. “The rain waters the beans, and it waters me, too,” writes Thoreau in his journal. I think of this line all the time. I didn’t even take a shower that evening, I was so soaked and washed by the rain. It felt a little like a baptism into the woods and rest.

I’m astonished at how empty I am—how much I need to fill back up. Truly, our bodies are not factories, but flesh and blood and soul.

Han Vanderhart, June Residency (at Weymouth Center) & Rest

When you have worked with a group of people once you get a real flavour of what else might be fun to do. I felt particularly excited at the thought of working together to create a group poem. This would be an even more dynamic way to celebrate National Poetry Day together because we would then have our own poem to share on the day itself.

In preparation for my visit I put together a set of my own poems on this year’s new theme of ‘Wonder’, and thought about an appropriate writing prompt. This time I wanted to do away with pencil and paper and stay in the moment whilst we were sharing creative thinking time, so I decided to record the offered responses. With the group’s permission I recorded what they were saying in response to different mini prompts. I then took the recordings away so that I could listen and see how the poem itself would emerge for reveal typing up. I discovered that three poems were emerging and the main one was fully formed itself in the voice notes. I am so looking forward to recording it with them in October.

As we gathered together this time, I thoroughly enjoyed watching everyone settling in.  Anthologies of poetry were brought to the circle as well as poetry journals and individual poems. I felt lucky to be invited back to this creative community. This small group made up of lovely individuals is a wonderful place to be. It is enabling me to hear the poetry sets I put together with new ears. It brings the joy of spontaneous conversation and laughter. It is one of those spaces that is fully in the moment.

Sue Finch, DONNING THE T-SHIRT

Over the weekend I realised I’d missed the deadline to apply for some work I’d have loved to do with the Poetry Library, earlier this year were several residencies I drafted applications for but couldn’t finish in time… It’s a particular quality of gutted when it’s not a case of not being picked, but of not even managing to get your name in the hat.

And as increasingly it’s my peers who are the recipients it feels a little like missing the bus and then spotting my mates grinning together in the top seats as it drives past.

What is there to be done? Obviously not sulk at home or get jealous and bitter – even though I’m gutted I don’t want to cultivate that within me. So it’s a case of being gentle with myself and of practicing sympathetic joy, a concept I first came across as compersion back when I was practicing Polyamory.

What is sympathetic joy? Put simply it’s feeling happiness for the joy and success of others, even when that success is something you wanted for yourself. It’s rerouting your thinking from ‘I wish that was me’ to ‘I’m so pleased that person/poet/friend is getting to take advantage of this opportunity that’ll be really great for their development’.

But it’s more nuanced than just giving yourself a different script; there’s work there in acknowledging your disappointment and allowing yourself to grieve a missed opportunity, and in working to connect with the positive emotion and feeling behind the sentiment you’re cultivating: it’s not enough just to say the words, the meaning comes through embodying that position.

And the other thing? When I stop to think about it I am actually pleased for these friends and peers, it’s not that hard to cultivate positivity for them because it already exists – I like these people and I’m glad they’re benefitting from these wonderful opportunities. And when I acknowledge that, it feels better inside me too – it counteracts the gutted.

I actually suspect this kind of thinking and practice is really useful to cultivate as a writer full stop, not just for someone in my position. It goes hand in hand with the understanding that being in creative spaces isn’t about being in competition but in conversation with each other, and celebrating each other’s successes alongside our own; the arts space is so special because of the multitude of voices and perspectives it contains, and when any of us are benefitting then it’s bolstering the community and landscape as a whole.

Rachael Hill, Missing deadlines and practicing sympathetic joy

For years Dylan has toured constantly, and he has for decades refused to play a show the way you would expect if you were a fan, casual or otherwise. I have no idea whether this was a conscious plan with a long term objective, or innate rebelliousness, or something that he did because he wanted to. Probably some people know, he has probably talked about it, but from my perspective, it just seems like a fantastic mystery.

I won’t go on and on. The show was transcendent. Mostly what I felt was relief. I wasn’t emotional, mostly, though at times hearing him sing reminded me that so many things in my life have happened, and now are gone, and his music was there all the time. This music was not about him. In a way, anyone could do what he did, which was to get up and not to depend in any way on his celebrity, his history, his Dylan-ness, but just to make a space where we could experience something singular. Anyone could do it, but very few can. And that is the difference.

His performance reminded me of what I believe constitutes artistic integrity: if I can ever create such a space (in performance or otherwise) with poems or music, I have not wasted my life.

He was in a cloak, and he cloaked us all in mystery and duende and mortality and timelessness. The only songs I recognized were All Along the Watchtower, Trying to Get to Heaven (a great song on Time Out of Mind), and the closer, Every Grain of Sand. The band was absolutely perfect: they play exactly the way I dream a band of mine will someday play, the sound I have heard in my head a million times. Bass locked down, two guitarists just holding it down with the absolutely perfect edge of breakup natural tones, playing only what is necessary, drummer also locked in, Bob on keys and singing. It was dark on the stage and there was no possibility of seeing his face. But he was there. When he played the harmonica I felt a great wonder in my soul. He is the only one who can play like that, and it sounds just like it did from the beginning.

Matthew Zapruder, A Great Witch

Picture this: a little cockney, looks like trouble, a sickly, druggy type, abroad for the first time, too long holed up in a cheap pensione, hurls a plate of pasta into the piazza and it all kicks off.

You’ve got the image. You’ve seen it in the newsreels. There’s a football crowd. Probably. Water cannons. Possibly. Plastic chairs thrown in foreign town squares. Fat, bald blokes taking swings. It’s ugly. There is a collective national tutting. Commentators say it’s a disgrace, headlines: The English Disease, there is outcry, a blight on our nationhood. England away. Love it.

The incident I describe in the opening paragraph didn’t take place during a World Cup or have anything at all to do with football. But it did happen. In 1820. The little cockney in question, a poet, one John Keats. OK, so he didn’t exactly chuck his spaghetti and start a riot but he did scrape the contents of his dinner plate from a high window onto the Spanish Steps in Rome and it caused consternation. He made a scene. He was a trouble maker. I mean he was brought up above a London pub, he got into scraps in the streets as a kid, was disruptive in class. He was a trouble maker in the best possible sense. He may not have been one of the lads but Keats, oh Johnny Keats he was a geezer.

The World Cup is upon us. You may be doing your best to ignore it. I tried but slowly it’s reeling me in once again. But this year something is off. Perhaps it’s the disturbing rise of nationalistic anger away from the stadiums that’s making me uneasy about participating in the pageantry. Football was always more about belonging than it ever was about jingoism. It was about rooting for the outsider, cheering on the underdog, coming together, celebrating. Yes it got messy. Sometimes it got very messy. I’ll admit I rather liked it when it did. There were times when I got carried away. But that’s poetry, right? That’s what poetry is supposed to do, it’s supposed to carry you away.

Let’s get this straight. I never liked sports. I’m not a sporty type. I dislike competition in general. But I adore football. Or I used to. It was a love affair, a love affair that occasionally turned toxic. I got picked for my school team (once), turned out for a local league side (twice) and played every Sunday for the Cubs where the coach employed a ‘turn up and you’ll get a game’ strategy. I liked his approach. I still like this approach. This is how we make poetry. This is how Keats made poetry. He just turned up, got a game. He didn’t have an expensive education, specialist training or all the fancy kit. You don’t need those things. Just a pen and some paper. A ball and some grass.

Jan Noble, N°68 A game for poets

ELSEWHERE, in a parallel proximity, a triple-tap. The last strike coming a moment later. Just as souls are rising through the dust cloud. The uncertain horizon conflates macabre and paranormal. Reality is the gate booby-trapped at the hinge.

ELSEWHERE, words echo like tambura notes. An unresisting background resonance. The idea that the earth has been helplessly rotating from the beginning’s beginning, recalibrates meaning.

ELSEWHERE, thousands of flecks of light rise like dancers to create new constellations in the night sky. Heads gather themselves, with their feet and waists and hungry mouths, into waiting parentheses.

ELSEWHERE, the day itself is a disquieting monotone. The monsoon sets up percussion and string. Rain is a pendulum in motion. Silence slips into wetness and reflection. Lines are wheels in revolution. Again. Again.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, That which we call a drone by any other name

From April through September of last year, I was corresponding with a poet from Iran who’d asked to interview me. Given the current situation and the fact that I know nothing about the poet’s situation, not even whether or not they are still alive, I am not going to name them here, but I’ve been thinking a lot about the questions they asked me since the beginning of the US-Israeli war against their country, since very few of them had any direct relationship to my work as a poet or to poetry in general. Still, they were all thought provoking, often leading me to articulate things I’d never really thought about before and that I think are worth sharing. Rather than work those answers into new essays, though, and out of respect for the poet who interviewed me, I’m going to preserve the Q&A format and publish my answers as I originally wrote them. You’ll understand immediately why I’ve decided to start with the second question in the series. Looking back, it seems especially prescient.

Q: “I strongly agree with Kafka’s statement that ‘war, in its first phase, emerges out of [a] total lack of…imagination.’ How do you view the main source of war?”

I’m not sure how to begin to answer this question. Since I have never—and I am grateful for this—had to live through a war, I have never been forced to confront face-to-face what it would mean for there to be people in the world who have defined me as an enemy who does not deserve to live. Even as I write that, though, I realize I have begun to formulate an answer. As my use of the word “defined” suggests, I believe lethal violence is rooted in a quintessentially imaginative act: the proactive imagining of another human being or group of human beings as nonhuman and therefore “killable” with impunity.

I have never believed that the default human stance towards others is to see them as so fundamentally, essentially different from ourselves that we also see their lives as inherently less worthy than ours; and I guess I do believe, therefore, that rendering someone “killable” requires willful, proactive effort. Even killing in self-defense requires this imaginative act. If someone is trying to kill you and killing them is the only way to save your life, you have to believe on some level that your potential murderer is no longer as fully human as you are and therefore no longer has the same right to live as you do.

I have never been through military training, but I remember walking to the post office in 1980 to register for Selective Service. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan and the possibility existed that then-President Jimmy Carter was going to reinstitute the military draft in response. He activated Selective Service registration in preparation for that possibility. I was eighteen years old. As I walked, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be trained to kill people I had never met and had no reason to hate. I couldn’t do it, but I knew that, if I ever were drafted, that’s what I would be trained to do, and the thought of what that would do to my humanity terrified me. I would never have been able to articulate it this way back then, but I was struggling with the question of whether and how I could resist the the militarization of my imagination.

Implicit in what I think you and Kafka mean by “a total lack of imagination” is the optimistic belief that the imagination is an inherently good and humanizing thing. That’s the way those of who are artists tend to think of the imaginative capacity out of which our art emerges, but I think we miss something crucial if we define as an absence a world view that is so diametrically opposed to our existence that the people who hold it are willing to go to war with us. I also think that defining their world view as an absence of imagination merely inverts the hierarchy that organizes how they see the world, placing ourselves on top instead of them.

If someone is indeed trying to kill you, though, if someone insists on prosecuting a war of aggression against you, you may very well have to kill them first in order to survive. I just think it’s important to remember that they’re not trying to kill you because they lack imagination, or because imagination has failed them. Rather, they are trying to kill you because of what they have imagined you to be, and they may very well give you no choice but to accept that nothing you can do will change their minds about that.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, The Source of War

i cease to sleep. i build the robot. i do not
want the robot but here it is. it makes
all the promises i do not want it to make.
it says, “we are gods.” my eyes well up.
the birds scatter into the dark hills.

Robin Gow, building the robot

Now that I’ve given up (temporarily?) the thought of getting a collection published, I’m going through my ‘collections’ and adding back all the poems I edited out. Poems that were removed because they weren’t ‘good’ enough, there wasn’t enough space for them to be included in a realistically publishable book, they retold a story or touched on a similar theme already established or they just didn’t quite make the cut. Poems I love, that tell the story I want to tell, capture the time the collection is about. Poems that deserve to be read, if only by me again. 

I’ve found poems in my first collection, poems in my Retired Poems and Spare Poems folders and in old versions of the collection that were lost over time and brought them together. I’ve printed the first set out, 160 pages. Crazy, I’ve forgotten so many of them. Rereading, stepping back into those moments is a wonderful way to waste a rainy afternoon. The pubs that I visited, people I’ve lost touch with or just lost, solo journeys I took, times before I was a partner, a mother, my youth, my inexperience. My glory days merging into real life. 

I’m boring so at the moment I just have them separated into the Scotland poems, the Finnish poems, the love poems. There are probably other exciting themes I haven’t delved into yet like My Childhood. The themes are so loose which allows me to collect more poems together. I’m not looking for something sellable, just a version of how I see my life and my work. It feels like a biography or another diary. Between my journals, my writing notebooks, my poems and their drafts I write so much. I’ve been writing obsessively for 30+ years, and it piles up.

Oh, how I want to edit some of the ones published in my first collection. My style has changed a lot. I used to love piling on the adjectives. I probably still do, I just hope I’m more subtle. I’m making notes on the print-outs, but I’m unsure if I’ll change much. I love to edit, but these feel like they should stay in my old voice. There’s nothing wrong with her, she’s just not me anymore. 

Gerry Stewart, Collecting the Collections

Today is the birthday of my friend Kathleen Kummer. After several falls, she is now very frail and housebound.

Kathleen and I met on a writing week with the poet Lawrence Sail at the beginning of the century. She had lived and worked in the Netherlands. We became friends. I visited her in Dorchester and in Devon where she moved, aged 79, to be nearer her two daughters.

Kathleen had a body of work when she moved to Devon and sent a manuscript to Alwyn Marriage at Oversteps Books. They published her debut collection Living below sea level (2012).

I am deeply grateful to Kathleen for our friendship and our poetry connection. Today I’m posting her poem Birthday Party, showing her empathy and eye for telling detail.

Fokkina McDonnell, Birthday Party – poem

I’ve been trying to read my sermon less, which in some ways is good, primarily in the more lively energy.  But I don’t like that I get tongue-tied, and I worry about my sermons getting longer.  I try to limit my discursive comments so that they don’t become a wandering tangent where I can’t easily get back.  I want a sermon to be 9-12 minutes, so if I’m going to continue this experiment in not looking at the manuscript as much, maybe the manuscript needs to be shorter.  

Now it’s time to shift my attention back to poetry writing.  My various writing projects do feed each other, while at the same time demanding time, which requires constant balancing.  Last week, I returned to a May rough draft of a poem, “A Song Both Familiar and Strange.”  In the poem, I connect my visit to my friend who had a catastrophic stroke which means she now lives in the skilled nursing unit to Julian of Norwich.  I did some serious revising, moving stanzas, taking out material.  I think it’s done, but before I started last week’s revisions, I thought it was done. […]

Last week I even made some poetry submissions. In some ways, it’s easier in the summer when many journals aren’t taking submissions. In September, when most journals are “open,” and most for a very short time, I find it overwhelming.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Sermon Revisions, Poem Revisions

I’m thrilled to share that poem “Confession to a Woodhouse’s Toad” appears in Whale Road Review Issue 43, a summer issue full of sharp, resonant work from writers I deeply admire.

One of the things I love about Whale Road Review is how intentionally they support their contributors. Each author page includes a direct tip link, so if a poem or essay moves you, you can thank the writer directly. It’s a small gesture that makes a meaningful difference in sustaining literary work.

If you’re curious about the editorial vision behind the journal, you might enjoy revisiting my earlier conversation with them: My interview with Whale Road Review. It’s a look at their ethos, their approach to submissions, and what they hope to champion in contemporary poetry.

Trish Hopkinson, My poem “Confession to a Woodhouse’s Toad” published in Whale Road Review + NO FEE call, Deadline: 6/15/2026

I wrote this on Arran, thinking about previous times on a variety of islands, and only once I had committed fully to this title [“The Misty Isle”] did I realise that it is the vernacular name for the Isle of Skye. In this poem, the Isle itself is Britain, and the mist is manifold. It represents, metaphorically, the mysterious sub-Roman era of British history, which has proved a fecund ground for my imagination. It is also, at its essence, true mist, to coat the landscape, obfuscating objectivity and creating endless interpretations of events which, were you to investigate yourselves, you would see have a huge swathe of differing opinions around them.

Drop-in by Hadley-James Hoyles [Nigel Kent]

Third person gives objectivity, distance, observation. First person gives subjectivity, close range, self-analysis. Third person can seem judgemental, first person can seem confessional. Using the same words except for his/my or I, here are both versions of the poem.  […]

While the man in the first version comes over as seedy and pathetic in his loneliness, which is the way the narrator wants us to see him and which may not be accurate, the narrator of the second version, because of the intensity of his self-awareness, becomes arrogant and much more menacing.

Maybe the second one works better, but it was an either/or choice and, for right or wrong, I plumped for the first, objective take on it. Perhaps it’s just an example of the way we need to step back, ask ourselves ‘what if’ I altered third person to first, or the other way round.

Bob Mee, OBJECTIVE OR SUBJECTIVE? WORKING OUT WHAT’S BEST

When I became a mother, I spent much more time in the house than I ever had before. On one of the endless nights of early motherhood when I was breastfeeding my daughter, I felt a wave of the most visceral panic wash over me as I realised I could not leave. I was tied there not just by the practicalities of breastfeeding, but the reality of love, which was as visceral as the panic I felt in that moment. I wrote about this in a poem in my recent collection The House of Broken Things called ‘Dear Wordsworth’: “I did not know / what horror love could be, how it keeps you / tied to one town, one house, one room, / one chair, one life”.

Later in the book I wrote about women who were found murdered and remain unidentified in a poem called “The Black Notices”. These women were found in the places women are often found, in bodies of water, in wasteland, in car parks, in forests. But once upon a time they lived in a House, and for whatever reason, they were not safe, they were pushed out, or driven out of a house, or they were kidnapped or lured away, or tricked on the way home, and now they are nameless.

The figure of the House and our expectations of it keeping us safe continues to haunt me. Writing The House of Broken Things has not exorcised the contradiction of the House from my mind or my desire to make sense of what it means to live with another – the gestures of love and the tiny acts of violence we inflict on ourselves and each other, and then if we are lucky, repair.

I’ve been doing quite a few readings recently and most have been followed by a question and answer session of some kind, and most of the interviewers (all apart from the one who didn’t bother to read my book in advance!) asked what the House was, what it represented to me, why I wrote multiple poems under the same title.

It’s taking me time to work out an answer that is in any way articulate, and part of the answer at least is that I don’t know, or I don’t know yet, or I am only beginning to know now. I know that the House is both the house of my childhood and the house of my motherhood, it is the house where I was mothered, and it is the house of my giving up, and the house of my enduring, it is the house of violence that I lived in once, and it is the house of my marriage, it is the house of loneliness and it is the house I escaped to, and I didn’t know until I finished writing this collection that I’m carrying all of these inside myself, that time means nothing inside the House.

Kim Moore, Inside the House of Broken Things

We were consumed? I keep on saying we.
Let’s talk about my own consuming passions,
the matter I’ve amassed for sixty years,
I and my spouse. At least our progeny
have flown, trailing their jettisoned possessions,
yet overnight we crammed space that was theirs
with things: books that seemed vital in the moment;
music, its living soul encased in vinyl.
What happened to the frugal hippie bride
I thought I was? What if it had to go—
everything, by some deadline, settled, final?
Fervent recycling wouldn’t stem the tide.
The angel might as well begin recording
the worst: I am a hoarder. This is hoarding.

Maryann Corbett, Stuff: a meditation

Jide Salawu is a Canadian-Nigerian writer. He is the author of Preface for Leaving Homeland, published under the African Poetry Book Fund, and the co-editor of African Urban Echoes, published by Griots Lounge Canada, and Contraband Bodies, published by NeWest Press and Narrative Landscape. He is currently a Black postdoctoral scholar in the Department of English at Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Ontario. 

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Thank you, rob. My first book, Preface for Leaving Homeland, was published in 2019. I had received an invitation from the African Poetry Book Fund for their chapbook series, headed by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani. The series has become a new cultural venue and has already produced new-generation African literary stars such as Gbenga Adesina, Gbenga Adeoba, Afua Ansong, Adedayo Agarau, Nour Kamel, Leila Chatti, Rasaq Malik Gbolahan, Momtaza Mehri, among others. So, as I was saying, I was nominated to submit to the boxset series. Before then, I had written individual poems addressing a variety of subjects. But my first sustained work that explores the precarity of mobility in Africa and beyond would be the chapbook. The overwhelming experiences of African migrants moving through trans-Saharan and Mediterranean routes become daunting archives that will inform most of the poems. In Contraband Bodies, I was thinking about African migrant within Africa as a racialized figure; this includes the xenophobic rage in South Africa now; I was thinking about migration from below and what I mean by that is rural/urban migration; I was thinking about my private memories as a Black African migrant moving across different diasporic spaces, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and within Africa. But I don’t own these memories alone. I have described Contraband Bodies as a personal record—I think this work imbricates other public experiences of the Black diaspora.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

It is a personal story that I am always glad to credit to my grandfather, who I would call a Yoruba poet, for his skill of oriki, a genre of oral poetry in Yoruba culture. He introduced me to the gift of literature and the sublimity of the Yoruba language. Yoruba is a highly tonal language, and quite musical. This does not mean all Yoruba people are poets, but the language is the first linguistic resource point for someone interested in literary culture. From that background, we can pick one or two things about my growth as a young writer. As a student, even when I was interested in poetry, and I had read literary greats such as David Rubadiri, Oswald Mtshali, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Kofi Awoonor, Jared Angira, I didn’t know how to begin writing. In 2005, Gabriel Arishe, a teacher in my secondary school in Shao, who had taken it as a duty to mentor me in English grammar, told me I could also write poetry. I thought I needed some celestial power to do so. That day ended with me writing a poem I titled, “Moonlight Days.” I wish I still had that scrap of paper on which I wrote the first poem. […]

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Arts, as you know, can be perverted. Arts have been in the service of oppression. rob, let me tell you about what is going on in the case of Nigeria. The politicians, after their tenure, are writing hagiographies (life-writings of sorts), and they are getting reviewed by professors who praise them. In the books, they glorify themselves and talk about their good deeds for the masses. That is how terrible it is. Globally, too, you know, there are writers who side with horrendous leadership and even justify their need for the governance. Writings were first used to service colonialism itself; I recall now Achebe’s “The Image of Africa” where he is in dialogue with Joseph Conrad. I think as a writer, I want to reject grand narratives. Speaking against tyranny and oppressive structures has been a whole duty, and this is my pure sentiment given my own background, appearance at the margin, as a person from a country like Nigeria. Tell the counter-story.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jide Salawu

I recently read a New Yorker article about misophonia that referred to the sound of “fingernails on a chalkboard.” Chalkboards. They were in every classroom throughout my schooling, but by the time my own children were in sixth grade, a middle-school remodeling push had replaced them with whiteboards. The college where I taught had whiteboards, as do most boardrooms, meeting places, etc. An occasional squeak of a too-dry marker is about as aurally annoying as it gets. Who uses chalkboards anymore? Maybe the occasional cafe for daily specials?

And therefore, why do we still use “fingernails on a chalkboard” when we want to describe something extremely irritating? Like many other phrases and images, that phrase is frozen into our language–there are hosts of them if you stop and think about it. 33rpm albums may be back for some niche music listeners, but most people under 20 have never actually heard “a broken record.” Pop culture moves so quickly; what do young people think it means when Blondie’s Debbie Harry says she’s in a phone booth ringing the telephone off the wall? (If they even happen to hear that song.) I think of these as ghost similes or metaphors, still haunting our language long after the origins have gone out of date. Some of them hang around for decades, maybe centuries; others fade like last year’s popular lingo.

I consider these things when I’m working on a poem. What will the words mean decades from now, or to a person in another culture, or to a very elderly reader? It’s not that I think my poems will be read decades from now–heck, they don’t have a lot of readers even today–but, because poems convey information and imagery in order to evoke interpretation and to create pleasurable sound and rhythm, poets need to think about the words we employ and why we use them. Allusions, metaphors, the lively sounds of slang or dialect, popular culture or political references, scientific terms, various kinds of jargon, words from languages other than English: they are all words, the writer’s main tools. And it can be harder than you’d think to get the right tool for the job.

At the same time, I don’t want to overthink. It gets in the way of writing poetry. I seriously doubt that Emily Dickinson gave a second thought about being picked up in a carriage by Death; horse-drawn carriages were a part of everyday life. When Whitman wrote of fishermen seining for menhaden on the Long Island shores (“A Paumanok Picture”), it’s unlikely he thought the word “mossbonkers” would send readers running to a dictionary. If we have to look up some words today to get a clear idea of what’s happening in a poem, I see no problem with that. Besides, the Whitman poem is so clear in its description, we don’t really need to.

Ann E. Michael, Ghost metaphors

Where are you now, Mama?

I want you to know that
I keep my hunger
under my bed
in the box
with the starving
baby.

I kept her bones.
I gnaw them sometimes
when all else fails.

I want you to know
that only a
silver of me
remains.
Starving.
An open pit,
a coal mine.

Rebecca Cook, Because My Hunger Has No Voice

Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong, is the latest (and second) pamphlet from Headless Poet.

Alex was kind enough to answer a few questions — on embarrassment, ‘bad’ puns, questionable taste, and the Victorians — over email. Some Poems is available for order here, and in stock now at the London Review Bookshop.

Jeremy Wikeley: I thought we might start by putting Hood in some kind of context, but every time I do this, I’ve no idea where to start. This is partly my own ignorance, but also because he straddles so many styles or concerns. There’s a romantic Hood, there’s a comic Hood, there’s a polemical Hood engaged in Victorian debates about poverty. The romantic, ‘Keatsian’ Hood was the biggest surprise to me. Is it fair to say he falls between the gaps?

Alex Wong: I think it is fair, if we’re talking about the gaps in current understandings of literary history. I mean the gaps between what have become the most familiar categories and groupings. For a start, when W.M. Rossetti called him ‘the finest English poet between the generation of Shelley and the generation of Tennyson’ he was placing Hood in a gap, and I think it’s still a gap in most people’s sense of the history of English poetry. It’s a small gap, almost not a gap at all unless you’re thinking in terms of ‘generations’, but in its small way it’s a little like the reign of Mary Tudor, or the gap between Chaucer and Malory: ask the average intelligent Eng Lit graduate who was writing in those periods and you’d be lucky to get more than one or two names. Very lucky, I should think.

And then he muddles our distinction between serious and ‘light’ verse, and between high and popular culture. Humorous poets who are basically doing something quite serious, though inconsistently and a bit under cover, tend to be hard to place … Stevie Smith for instance. But Hood muddles it further, because he also delves so deeply, and so obviously, into topical moral concerns — ‘big issues’ — without giving up the trappings of his light verse. And he muddles it all even further still, by also having written those comparatively highbrow ‘romantic’ poems you’re alluding to.

But I don’t think you could say that he fell between the gaps in his own day. A lot of people were reading Hood when not very many were reading Keats. Hood sold a lot of books, a lot of magazines and annuals. And also we sometimes forget about the reading rooms and circulating libraries that allowed people across classes to access these texts. He was truly popular. He found a gap in the market, and in the culture, but he filled it pretty effectively; he didn’t fall through it. […]

JW: Punning must have something to do with writing from the unconscious? Could you say something more about the way in which Hood shaped that appreciation (for puns) at the time, or in perhaps in the poets he’s influenced? You mention Auden was a fan in the introduction — so much of Auden is in terribly ‘bad taste’. And Moul recently spotted that J. H. Prynne’s first published poem seems to have been a translation (into German, I mean really) of ‘Silence’.

AW: Well, the Lacanians say the unconscious is structured like a language — but we won’t get into that. Anyway a mind that is habitually punning is a mind that is letting associations range pretty freely, you could say. And I think Hood, not only when he’s punning, does tend to be open to the associations of things – erotic, violent or scatological associations, awkward afterthoughts – and he’s happy to run with them. It’s part of what makes his writing seem a bit overcharged for some tastes, the O.T.T. quality. As with the puns and ingenious rhymes, so with other things; there’s an opportunism, if you like, or just a huge openness. He goes for it. But Empson makes an interesting point in Seven Types of Ambiguity, when he argues that Hood’s comical verse seems to use punning to pull back from things that could get really awkward, to dispel the tension somehow. Which is almost the opposite point of view. And I guess it does relate to what I was saying about ‘Bridge of Sighs’ and the impulse to make something tolerable, even though that’s a poem in which he does get seriously involved in something genuinely challenging.

Of course, the puns are also embarrassing when you don’t get them. That’s another important aspect of the embarrassment of puns. And I suppose it connects with Prynne, about whom I can’t say very much because generally I don’t ‘get’ him. I mean I haven’t reached a satisfactory accommodation with what he’s doing, at least after the earliest poems. And I’m somewhat embarrassed about it. But, well, I suppose it’s not surprising that Prynne should have had an interest in Hood. Although that particular sonnet isn’t a punning one (it’s about ‘silence’, so in a sense it’s about the terrifying void that’s left when the punning has to stop), still there’s conceivably a relationship between Hood’s almost maniacal aliveness to double-entendre and Prynne’s — I would call it rather intellectual — love of etymological and phonetic play.

The really fundamental difference for me is that Hood’s poems always create the illusion of a real utterance, a person speaking, with the bonhomie that comes with that; he’s appealing more directly to our ways of reading small adjustments of tone in our everyday communications. Auden is closer to Hood in that respect, although in some ways … I think you could say that where his debt to light verse is most apparent, his urbane wit probably feels closer in inspiration to other predecessors, like Praed. But it’s been a long time since I’ve spent much time with Auden, so I may be wrong.

Jeremy Wikeley, How much depends on the exactness of the spell

The publication of Michael Laskey’s Collected Poems by Smith/Doorstop coincides with his receiving the King’s Gold Medal for Poetry at the beginning of this year. As well as consistently publishing his own poetry across four decades (he is now 81), Laskey is well known for co-founding and directing the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival, co-editing the magazine Smiths Knoll for twenty-one years, as a poetry tutor, and as publisher of The Garlic Press, which mainly features work by poets from Suffolk, where Laskey lives.

This edition combines Laskey’s six existing collections and fifteen new poems. Until his recent royal accolade (which ‘completely astonished’ Laskey), his poetry had not gained the public recognition some felt it deserved; an endorsement on the back of the book by Stephen Fry says: ‘Michael Laskey is one of England’s finest poets you’ve probably never heard of.’ Typically, a Laskey poem is a quiet one – and quiet work is often unjustly overlooked or sidelined. This is a pity: Laskey’s poems, I feel, have real lasting power.

I read almost the whole of this 385-page collection outside on a sunny April day, the setting enhancing the poems, and vice versa. I found I then wanted to read the collection again more slowly – as an ‘off-duty’ reader rather than a critic – simply because the poems were a pleasure to engage with and I wanted to spend more time with them. Laskey is a poet who celebrates, even ‘thrives on’, he explains in ‘Quotidian’, the ‘everyday, the humdrum, dull for some’: ‘small’ pleasures; humble, ordinary experience. Craig Raine has called him ‘our poetic Alan Bennett – a genius of, as it were, biscuit barrels and wry grief.’ As Andrew McCulloch has pointed out though, on introducing Laskey’s poem ‘The Lawnmower’ as the TLS ‘Poem of the week’, ‘The world Laskey describes may be familiar […] but its images are far from cosy’ or complacent: the interplay of real familial emotions and failed connection that he often depicts, especially between parent and child, is (in McCulloch’s brilliantly exact observation) ‘softly tragic’. He is like a more domesticised Larkin – a poet who also had the sensitivity to see, and to reveal, the beauty and the interest in the so-called ‘dull’ moments of our lives. As Larkin remarked in an interview with John Haffenden: ‘I don’t want to transcend the commonplace, I love the commonplace, I lead a very commonplace life. Everyday things are lovely to me.’ Laskey’s own attention to the commonplace extends to the word itself: he wittily points out in ‘Quotidian’ that he doesn’t like this ornate, Latinate synonym: ‘not a word / I’d choose, actually one I avoid – / […] it contradicts / what it means’. Obfuscation is not part of Laskey’s poetic project.

Nicola Healey, Thriving on ‘the humdrum’: Michael Laskey

Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), wrote Arthur Symons in 1904 in the Atlantic,

was twenty-six, the age of Keats at his death, before he wrote any original verse. He then wrote two poems to two ladies: one out of a bitter personal feeling, the other as a passing courtesy; neither out of any instinct for poetry.

From inauspicious beginnings, how strangely things fall out. Through the last three years of the eighteenth century and into the first decade of the nineteenth, Scott followed these first amateur attempts with translations from Goethe and collections of traditional ballads in two volumes of Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. His narrative poem Lay of the Last Minstrel — begun in 1802, published in 1805 — was followed in fairly rapid succession by the 1808 Marmion (of which “Lochinvar” remains the best-known section), The Lady of the Lake in 1810, and four other long narrative poems. All this output made him, temporarily, the most famous poet in of his era.

What rendered Scott’s poetic fame so temporary? Short answer: the appearance, in 1812, of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. There was, Symons wrote, “a more popular poet in England,” and his name was not Scott, but Byron. Though Scott continued to write verse — his final long poem, Harold the Dauntless, would appear in 1817 — he turned his energies to prose and the completion of the story that became Waverley, the first of his historical novels, published in 1814.

At this juncture we could ask, as Symons did, whether Scott hadn’t really been a novelist all along: not a poet after all, but a mere “improviser in rhyme,” whose true charism was prose narrative. Certainly the verse by which he had made his name had narrative as its first end — though as we might reflect, casting our minds back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, poetry was telling stories almost before it was doing anything else. It’s not as though the narrative impulse somehow canceled out the poetry; Scott’s own narrative poems drew directly from the tradition of the medieval romance. And yet if Scott’s poems were as popular as they were, it was because

they were so like novels. They were, what every publisher still wants, “stories with plenty of action;”and the public either forgave their being in verse, or for some reason was readier than usual, just then, to welcome verse.

Scott’s turn to the novel, then, simply dispensed with the need to go through the motions of verse — at which Byron was better, anyway — in order to deliver what the public really wanted: “stories with plenty of action.” No need to make those stories rhyme and scan, if the musical pleasure of verse wasn’t the first principle of composition and integral to the generation of the narrative.

If those narrative poems of Walter Scott had been successes, then — in dispensing with the effort of poetry altogether — Scott with his gift for a rousing good tale could and did make the novel popular, in a way that even his own action-packed poems, as poems, had not been. “The fact is,” wrote Symons, “that skill in story-telling never made any man a poet” — not, again, that “skill in storytelling” ever made any man not a poet, either. The question is one of priority and proportion, and of what the indispensable element in a given literary work actually is, for both writer and reader. For Scott, and for his readers, that indispensable element was action, not music.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Proud Maisie

Those trained up in civics and classical political theory — which, with the decline of philology, may well be a good majority of intellectuals with a leaning toward the traditional — would tend to take Yeats to be describing something akin to thumos, the kind of drive toward that Tennyson’s Ulysses has. Major Gregory seeks some reward, even if it’s a hidden fame, and such rewards are of necessity defined by the social order. “Man is by nature a political animal,” as Aristotle put it, and nobility is found in the polis, and the virtues of the great soul are in life lived among others.

That is, on its face, absent from the Irish airman. He confesses a social location: “My country is Kiltartan Cross, / My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor.” But he’s deliberately left them behind, willing to fight for the British with whom he feels no connection, to seek some entirely individual experience — not just an impulse of delight, but a lonely impulse of delight.

He lacks, for example, the virtue of bravery we think expressed most clearly in self-sacrifice, the willingness to give up one’s life to save another. Oh, he’s obviously brave in the sense of having willingly entered the sphere of war, where life and death are brought to the sharpest point. But the thing he finds therein is sheer experience, as felt by someone with the rare gift of sensibility — a figure great enough to feel the heightened sense of the moment. He wants not fame, I think, or glory, but the perfect balance of the now:

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

This is not a social claim, a placing in a political order, but a metaphysical thing, new to humanity in the modern order — born of the highly self-conscious self of modernity. He seeks not Tennyson’s newer world but the sheer perfection of the experienced now in the life and death of war.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death

I dreamed of a dead friend.
We did not touch. We spoke.

I was deaf. We looked at art,
though I was blind. This morning,

the roses are pink and smell
of rain.

Sharon Brogan, Snapshot Poem 10 June 02026

“The Intentions of Thunder” is a collection of new and selected poems from Patricia Smith. It is deliberately substantial, both in terms of the number of poems and the depth of poetry. The collection draws from “Life According to Motown” (1991), “Big Towns, Big Talk” (1992), “Close to Death” (1993), “Blood Dazzler” (2008), “Shoulda been Jimi Savannah” (2012), “Incendiary Art” (2017), “Unshuttered” (2023) plus uncollected poems. It is nearly impossible to provide a flavour of the range of poems that the collection covers. Picking favourites is easy but would render this review far too long to read. […]

Patricia Smith is a poet of witness, determined not to let her community go unheard or unrecorded. That doesn’t make her worthy or dull, on the contrary, she has a playfulness and a deft control of form, whether that’s a ‘choose your own adventure’ choice of sonnets on Emmett Till or recording the aftermath of Katrina without letting politicians off the hook. “Intentions of Thunder” is a book to return to, each visit bringing a new reward. It’s lazy to describe her as heir to Gwendolyn Brooks. Smith has long stepped out from that useful mentorship and found her own strong, compelling voice. But it’s useful to let Brooks have the last word, writing that Smith’s work is “direct, colloquial, inclusive, adventuresome.”

“The Intentions of Thunder” is available from Bloodaxe. If you’ve not read any Patricia Smith, this is an excellent place to start.

Emma Lee, “The Intentions of Thunder” Patricia Smith (Bloodaxe) – book review

Still Life with Sorrow & Joy, Lana Hechtman Ayers, The Poetry Box, 2026

What a lucky thing to have poet-friends.

I had two big deadlines at the end of May (didn’t quite make them, but almost);  I’m teaching another Creative Retirement Institute Class (on William Stafford, and it’s going beautifully); and I seem to have forgotten all about being a blogger. But then comes this package in the mail, two books from none other than the Lana Hechtman Ayers, managing editor (and one-woman dynamo) of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series, MoonPath Press, and World Enough Writers. […]

Penelope Scambly Schott calls Still Life with Sorrow & Joy ” a joyous celebration,” full of both grief and delights. The collection plays with form, pays tribute to other poets, dreams wildly, and blends paeans to beloved pets with longing for lost two-legged loved ones. The poems are all about love, though at times they keen over our failure to love enough. In the very short, “Night Vision Goggles,” we get these three bare lines: “All we do not understand / could fill battlefields — // and does.”

Bethany Reid, Lana Hechtman Ayers, STILL LIFE WITH SORROW & JOY

Near the end of Eclogue 9, Lycidas, who is keen to continue singing despite Moeris’ obvious sorrow and reluctance, points out that they’ve reached the tomb of Bianor, the half-way point of their journey, where the farmers are stripping the foliage. He suggests they should put the kids they are carrying down here and pause for a song.

hinc adeo media est nobis via; namque sepulcrum
incipit apparere Bianoris. hic, ubi densas
agricolae stringunt frondes, hic, Moeri, canamus;
hic haedos depone, tamen veniemus in urbem.

Here’s Heaney again:

We’ve come half-way.
Already you can see Bianor’s tomb
Just up ahead. Here where they’ve trimmed and faced
The old green hedge, here’s where we’re going to sing.
Set that creel and those kid-goats on the ground.
We’ll make it into town in all good time.

Once again, what sounds pragmatic is also allusive. In Theocritus 7, a tomb — in that case of Brasilas — similarly marks the half-way point of a journey. But the name Bianor itself comes from Homer (Iliad 11.86-92), where he is, like so many of those words in Callimachus’s epigram for Heraclitus, a hapax, a name that appears only once. His death, which sets off the battle that ends with the death of Patroclus, takes place, we are told, at that hour in the day when woodsmen at work cutting trees in the forest feel the longing to rest and eat. In his enthusiasm, Lycidas is, as it were, suggesting a Homeric pause.

Moeris refuses: he says they have to get on and there’s no time to waste. In that, he is rather like Meliboeus in the first eclogue, who is being cast out in such a hurry that he has had to leave behind two new-born kids, twins who are the spes gregis (“hope of the flock”), forcing the mother goat to go on without them. There is no solace there of the kind offered by Heraclitus’ poem, in which one twin accompanies the mother in death and the other stays with the father. Here in the ninth eclogue, though, they are carrying the kids with them; and though Moeris does not want to sing any more himself, he hopes that Menaclas will yet take up the song.

Virgil is not sure that songs endure. As Heaney says himself in his fine essay on pastoral, the question of the Eclogues is that of Shakespeare:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

He’s not sure, but he hopes it might be so.

Victoria Moul, All these songs I have forgotten

— One of those books I own and will never let go of is Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks by W.S. Di Piero. In some ways, it doesn’t look like much, it’s a slim volume, but some of the thoughts it holds have changed me, helped me, opened me up. The style of writing, the form, these too have been useful.

— I’ve quoted from it before at length, but today this:

“The offices of poetry. To use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity. To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumour, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic vicious wind tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, over against opportunistic mendacity. If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it really is marginal or beside the point.”

— Published in 2017, that could be from yesterday.

— Everywhere you look, enshittification, mediocrity. (For this is what degenAI is). But good poetry is the opposite of that, good art of any sort. I think, and I’ve said this before and should probably just stop, that there is no point in talking about the lousy stuff, but to just give space to great art, great literature etc.

Shawna Lemay, The Offices of Poetry

Wordsworth began his “Ode” in 1802. It’s a poem that embodies his philosophical stance on childhood vision and its eventual loss, implying that what has been forfeited must first be named before it can be recovered.

Could there be a more problematic condition for a poet? If it’s the poet’s job to pay tribute to states of feeling (as Wordsworth writes in the Preface, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquility,”) then their success hinges on the ability to see and sense deeply, to recollect clearly and attentively.

And these are the poem’s opening lines. He’s set high stakes for the rest, which documents Wordsworth’s departure from a world of wonder to a world worn smooth by sight. Adulthood strips away that “freshness of a dream,” leaving the poet feeling less able, maybe even less inclined, to write about the world with the same appetite and astonishment.

Coleridge, Wordsworth’s longtime collaborator, talks about this risk in Chapter XIV of Biographia Literaria. He praises his friend in Preface to Lyrical Ballads and credits him for tuning Coleridge’s own sight “to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarly and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

I love the phrase “the film of familiarity,” which suggests that time dulls the senses, reducing one’s sensitivity to the world’s wonder, yes, but also reducing one’s capacity for empathy, “ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”

I’m sometimes asked why I chose to research wonder—saying my PhD was on the role of wonder in poetry does sound slightly like I apprenticed myself to a unicorn paddock for four years. Here’s why: the potential and incentive for renewing wonder is serious business. It transcends the individual and speaks to the larger human project, to the belief that deep inquiry into individual experience may lead to greater appreciation of collective experience, and that this appreciation is vital for humanity’s survival.

The more we wonder, the less of an appetite we have for destruction, Rachel Carson argued. Poems are the perfect wonder vehicles. They are wonderfully efficient and cost-effective wonder delivery systems.

Maya C. Popa, What Adulthood Forgets: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the Fate of Wonder

I went on a long hiatus from writing, a sort of starvation, somewhere around the start of the pandemic. I can’t tell if this was a totally conscious choice, but I knew my writing life needed a deeper anchor.

I am slower now. I rarely submit my work. And when I do, it’s because I feel truly called to the journal. I speak and read when it feels aligned. I write because I want to. I work on projects that feel like I am alive. I say no to opportunities that are extractive and dulling, even if they are shiny.

I spend a lot of days not writing. I read a lot. I live. I celebrate other writers. I write books and pieces that have no intended publisher and no end goal. I am working on a memoir in a time when “no one wants memoir unless you’re a celebrity,” bla bla bla.

I am doing it because I would rather die than not.

Some of this is also about being tired, older, chronically ill, and overstimulated without social media and expectation. Some of this is that my life has expanded, and I am nourished beyond art. But most of it is that I burned myself out on myself.

Writing is a gift. We don’t have to do it. Literally, we don’t have to be here. Like, we can quit. We get to do it. We want to do it, right? We get to be the arbiters of pure and total consciousness. We get to reach into the river and feel the current. And we get to translate it. What a joy to crawl back into the creative self as a joy and not as a form of proof or punishment.

Lisa Marie Basile, There are two writers within me—and they are eating each other alive

Just write it out of you. Write anything, don’t even try to get to the new. Have no goal to heal the the pain you think is in you through the writing. Just write any damn thing that comes before your eyes. Fictionalise it. Steal. Be the bad guy for once, but just write and in a while as you keep writing it will start to be enough. I don’t know or care why. Nor do I want you to write a book or monetise your pain in some way. Just fucking write, and forget healing, forget being a writer, a poet, a thinker, someone with an opinion. Let the writing fill up the page without all these things you think you are and it will raise you up just by you having written, and without you getting in your own way.

John Siddique, Write It

I remember crossing out poems in the school booklet because we weren’t doing them.

I remember “Bean green over blue”.

I remember the poetry editor who said of a rival: “We must crush them.”

I remember the poet who paused mid-reading to savour the word “ontologically”.

I remember the poet who was sarcastic about skiing holidays to the festival organiser.

I remember finding rhymes.

I remember fridge poetry, but not fridge poems.

I remember the poet stuck on a bus texting about what it meant to send a text saying “I am here”.

I remember “Fire-fangled feathers dangle down”.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, I Remember Poetry

That was the invitation of the final prompt: to imagine a future self, ancestor, spirit, object, animal, place, or other presence watching over a moment from our lives. What might they see that we could not see then? What language might they use for our seeing? What might their gaze loosen, bless, protect, question, or refuse?

During the session, I found myself writing about the “birdbath” visible from our apartment balcony. I say “birdbath,” but what I really mean is the sizeable dip in the parking lot asphalt that becomes a watering hole after rain. Birds gather there for hours, splashing, pausing, lifting off, returning.

The prompts kept asking us to shift perspective, to let looking move from the self to elsewhere and back again. Here’s a haiku that came from that space:

robin in a puddle
my eyes from there
an afterthought

I like that the poem lets the looking happen away from me. The robin does not need to become symbol, messenger, or metaphor right away. It gets to be there first: in the puddle, in the after-rain, in its own attention. My eyes arrive later, almost beside the point.

That feels like one lesson I’m carrying from the workshop: sometimes looking as a way of writing means letting the self become secondary, decentered long enough for the world to look back.

José Angel Araguz, post-workshop thoughts: my eyes from there

Morning light tints the walls
the same color as what leaks into the streets.
You swing your feet over the side of the bed
and they look for slippers, as if they had that
small, separate autonomy. What does it mean
to live without asking, or expectation? Your arms
slide into sleeves, lift a cup of water to your lips.

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

This week: the prow of the house, swampy winged women, a parking space for dreams, rubbish dumps and petrol pumps, and much more. Enjoy.

One morning last week I woke abruptly from a dream about Horace’s ode to a wine-jar, Odes 3.21, which begins o nata mecum consule Manlio (“o female-thing born with me when Manlius was consul, i.e. in 65 BC”). In the dream, the first line was the actual first line but the following three were some kind of made-up dream-Latin, though in alcaics of course, like the original.

Horace’s odes are almost all addressed to people. There are very few to non-human entities: just this one, 1.32 (the poet addressing his own lyre) and 3.13 (to the Bandusian spring). Odes 3.21 is accordingly quite often treated as a kind of comedy-ode or even a send-up of one, and this isn’t wrong, exactly: it obviously is meant to be humourous and perhaps quite affectionate. But thinking of it as a joke is not a very good guide to the experience of the poem either, because as so often in Horatian lyric, the poem ends up somewhere very different from where it started. If it begins as a kind of send-up of a hymn and a joke about Horace’s tendency to write poems about boozy parties, it ends as an actual hymn, with one of the most mysteriously beautiful closing lines in all of Horace.

Victoria Moul, O gentle tile

It was bliss. The first time this year lying on a hammock in my backyard, under tall trees, the green-filtered flickering light and Medieval music in delicious fifths on decidedly 21^st century earbuds. Then I stopped the music and listened to the birds. Our yard is surrounded by trees and is near a ravine so we have many birds and many varieties. As I was listening, I was thinking about Bernie Krause’s concepts related to soundscapes and biophony and especially the acoustic adaptation hypothesis and the niche hypothesis, that is where creatures carve out their own acoustic space in a soundscape, usually through occupying a particular frequency niche. So, not only what are the sounds of birds, but how do different birds occupy a soundscape together.

I’ve always loved seemingly uncoordinated sounds from crowds. So, rather than the coordinated homophony of church choirs, the heterophonic and more anarchic traditional chanting (including muttering) of the synagogue congregation. The aggregate sound of a party or really any large human group just doing their thing. The many intertwined voices overlapping, cancelling each other out, winding around each other, changing depending on position and depending on the pitch and timbre of the voices, occupying different acoustic niches.

All of this inspired me to rise from the hammock and create a setting of a poem, and specifically something that I’ve wanted to experiment more with: multiple versions of the same voice but presented in various overlapping ways so the words wash over you. Do you absorb the words and their meaning by osmosis? What if one voice was slightly louder? Does time pass differently as the various word repeat, echo or anticipate each other? What does it do to the language part of the brain as opposed to the music or environmental listening part of the brain?

Gary Barwin, Everyone talking and singing at the same time

This week I’ve been flying solo, a poetry reading in Rome at Keats-Shelley House, an award ceremony and a launch for an underground poetry pamphlet series. I booked an apartment and spent most of my fee on a view across the Eternal City, the dome of St Peter’s a stone’s throw from the terrace. This is not a step up. I’ll still have nothing in my pockets when I come home. But this, this I tell myself, is poetry. You don’t get to take views home with you. They remain in the places where poetry goes.

My exuberance was perhaps due to my Instagram feed that is, like everyone else’s, notoriously populated with ‘my-life-is-better-than-yours’ views. In the last weeks it has been hijacked by writers from the Hay Festival, novelists mainly, not discussing ideas, not getting into it, not getting deeply down into it but bragging, mostly bragging about the idyllic locations where they’ve written their latest best sellers.

“I spent a delightful month in Tuscany,” says Sheila De Vinity, author of the A Millpond at Marlborough (Chatsworth & Grimstone) a W.H.Smith recommendation or David Henchman-Trout addressing a sold out crowd in a tent, “I find the pace of Dorset just suits my writing,” and Daphne Soames who you’ll probably know from All Our Mothers’ Sons saying with a contrived world weariness, “Each year my publisher banishes me to a villa in Umbria and tells me not to come home until I’m done.”

Fuck you, I think, fuck you, I shout at my phone. And then I book a fancy apartment in Rome. Because I want to be like them, the writers, the serious writers who don’t seem to have a view on anything, who only seem to have a nice view over something.

Jan Noble, What do you do with a view?

One of Richard Wilbur’s best known poems, “The Writer,” begins in his daughter’s room “at the prow of the house / where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden. . . ” For years I thought I knew what that meant, “the prow of the house.” Wilbur’s biographers, who have located the very house and the very room, tell me I am not quite correct, but I hold to my mental image. I live in a house with a prow, and a neighborhood full of such houses. The years I’ve spent writing poetry have made clear to me the hold that these streets and these houses have on my imagination. In the normal order of things, supposing my work is remembered, it might be years before some critic noticed its rootedness in a place. I have the chutzpah to talk about it myself because the place is already beginning to disappear.

In architectural terms, my “prow” is a dormer, projecting from the roof-plane at the front of the house. A gable end with a prominent window can have the same visual effect. On the streets I inhabit, a hundred such dormers and gables jut into the sea of society. In each the containment of the family puts its public face toward the street, propriety and stature on view. These are Edwardian and even Victorian houses, creaky with age but spacious, with dormers that often extend from third stories, looking into the crowns of mature trees. In times past, high windows on these streets would have been tossed with elm; the dying elms gave place to ash trees, now dying in their turn and being more thoughtfully replaced with varied species. Our own tossing is done by maples.

In spiritual terms—that is, from its interior—a dormer of this kind is a place of solitude and protection. As its etymology declares, it’s often a place to sleep. The sloping walls created by the main roof, or by the dormer itself, lean in as if to embrace the inhabitant: sleeping child, daydreaming teenager, adult engrossed in some attic-exiled craft.

Maryann Corbett, Houses, Neighborhoods, Poems

When I arrived, a woman was sitting in the quiet at a side table in front of a laptop, looking pensive over the keyboard. Two people were setting up a table of books for sale. One by one people drifted in, slightly disheveled, many, some looking halt and infirm, then others arriving in twos and threes, more nimble, clutching bags and notebooks, chattering, some, others sitting quietly, men, more women, mostly middle aged and above, some scattered younger folks, one group looked like a parent and an adult child or two. Sneakers, light jackets against the rain shower, some cool glasses here and there. A writers festival, the mountains of northern New York State. I spoke to someone from Vermont, a woman from Texas visiting a daughter. That family I saw turned out to be locals. An old friend was there with his son, having traveled in from two other parts of the north to meet there. Fiction, mystery, romance, memoir, poetry, fantasy, plays, screenplays — all the minds roiling with ideas and the desire to write. In Ukraine, according to the article, the same, but younger, many wearing army fatigues, chatter, hugs, periodic evacuations because of the possibility of incoming missiles, all clutching bags of books, minds full of stories. Physicists are positing that all reality is relational, not material. We are many things, we problematic human species, but we are word lovers, tellers of tales, avid listeners, against odds of geography, war, life’s inherent limitations, large and small, grievous and petty. I am moved by this.

Marilyn McCabe, & time works it out

There’s something powerful about gathering in a room with other people to work on our writing together. There were four of us in the library yesterday, and another six online, and for an hour, all of us were working in silence, except for the scribbling of my pen and the tapping of their keyboards. It’s a pleasantly organic, embodied experience, writing like this; it reminds me of the old days in the newsroom when six or twelve of us were huddled around a large table in one room, working, together. Except in the writing circle, none of us are on deadline, and we’re all there just to support one another in our various writing projects. I noticed, at the end of that hour, that my heart rate had slowed and my anxiety levels were lower.

Dylan Tweney, Five things for June 4

Yeah, I know, Wile E. Coyote isn’t saintly, but all those years ago, watching Saturday morning Looney Tunes, young me empathized with him way more than with the smug, always-victorious Roadrunner. I hereby salute everyone giving creative chase this summer, painting tunnels on rocks, building devious literary contraptions to trap a fleeting spirit, even knowing we’ll take a lot of canyon falls.

I recently revised a brief lyric essay starring Wile E. and Krazy Kat and placed it under submission, along with a lot of poems, as I hunt out which magazines are open during these dog days (Virginia’s humidity blanket has settled on my valley). Oh, Ploughshares, how I’ve tried and tried to snag your attention almost every June for decades now: will I ever catch you? Some of my poetry submissions from earlier this spring landed well, thanks to editors at The Common, Ecotone, and SWWIM Every Day. Thanks, as well, to a few editors for sending me encouraging notes with their rejections. The longer I trudge through the desert, the more I appreciate that kindness.

Lesley Wheeler, Wile E. Coyote, patron saint

Saturday was reading through poems and checking I’m happy they’re ready, then making two lists: one of poems and one of places to send them. I also nominally suggested which poems I might send where but of course I changed this when it actually came to sending the subs (not sure if these were actually good changes, but it’s too late now!). Then the actual subs were split over Sunday and Monday, plus one on Friday night after work. I split them up cos it takes me a long time, I struggle to decide what to send where, and to stay on task, and I have to do a lot of checking to make sure I’ve included/omitted all the things on the instructions; trying to send too many in one day is overwhelming and ends up not happening. […]

It’s time consuming, right, and a bit of a headache. Even with doing all my writing in a 12 point standard font and basic formatting (excluding concrete poems obvs) I still have to read back through and double check all the formatting specs cos they’re slightly different across a lot of places.

Then if it’s a comp you have to make sure your name isn’t on it… some want page numbers in a particular place… some are specific about what they want in the file name… some want you to include a line count in the top right or the top left… some specify spacing…

Some want a separate entry form attached along with your submission, while my favourite (joking, obviously) want you to fill out their online form, make payment through a separate portal, and then email your poems along with transaction/receipt numbers and other specified information in the body of the email. Trying to get all these separate points correct as a neurodivergent is – to put it mildly – absolutely fucking brain-melty.

Rachael Hill, SUBMISSIONS – insert facepalm icon here –

I’m a bit like a hermit crab right now, quietly working on my new books. Trying to make time to stare at big skies, take deep breaths, dream big dreams and patiently birth new worlds. 

Salena Godden, Books & Festivals: Summer 2026

My father is passing
through these last days
like a ghost
he lies in
the nursing home bed
while finite iterations
of him skulk their way
toward the grave.

I am stuck in time
mulling over the past
as though I am
polishing rocks in
my mouth.

Rebecca Cook, Edit A Poem With Me

How can we tell, the ones who will be here only briefly. Is it the eyes, the smile through the unannounced pain. Is it the wandering. Where did you sleep most nights? In a poem for you I apologised, ‘I never knew your address’.

Is it the ones who pass us by like a flash, like a light, brightly. Cast deep into the back of our minds. At one point we all needed a break. Some of us were settling down, as they say. I last saw you from the 38 bus.

All of this in the one single poem I have ever written for you.

Luciana Francis, Map of Our Lives

We went to a different part of the North Carolina mountains, near Boone.  We were there for the wedding of my spouse’s sister’s oldest child.  The wedding was beautiful, of course, but there were other beautiful moments:

–On Monday night, we went to Parallel Brewing in Boone for a rehearsal dinner/party.  Do they brew beer?  I don’t know.  Did I taste it?  No.  I wanted wine to go with the pizza.  Was any of the wine memorable enough to make note of what it was?  No.

–I was much more interested in Huzzah Books, which shares the building with Parallel Brewing.  We could go back and forth, which made the party better–more space.

–I also loved lingering among the books, which seemed to be used books from decades when publishers were more serious about publishing.  I found a book of “best new poetry” published in 1960 or so.  The names were fairly familiar and all male, except for Adrienne Rich.

–One of our younger family members (21 or so) was thrilled to find a book by Jane Kenyon.  I was thrilled that she was thrilled.

–We didn’t do more in Boone.  We spent most of our time visiting with family members on the front porches of our cabins.  If it had been clearer weather, we’d have had a glorious view.

–I did love seeing the fog/mist move across the land, only to vanish.  Once again, I thought about how humans might come to believe in ghosts.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Memory Whisps from Last Week’s Travel to the High Country of NC

The author event is good, as it is every year. It’s one of those jobs that I look forward to. I take 1-2-1s with PhD and MA students, helping them in their publication journeys, boosting confidences. In between events I take some time to wander into York looking for a building I’ve heard about but never seen. I walk up and down the street several times until I finally find it – the oldest house in York, tucked down an alley way called Trembling Madness Apartments.

The passageway leads to a courtyard. Within the courtyard are the ruins. An ancient window looks out into the brickwork of the wall behind it, floor joists jut from the wall, holding up air. This is the sort of ruin I like – the juxtaposition of it; the bins against the masonry, the fag ends next to the romance of a 12^th century window trailing ivy like a fairytale. I stand for a while undoing the modern to reach the past, reducing the surrounding buildings to nothing, the minster back to its original wooden structure, the window back to a view of the river, the fields. The woman in my novel would have known this place as a ruin too. It’s possible she walked here. I feel her feet in my feet, as if the building is a pin that sticks us together, holding us in one space.

As I leave, an American couple is talking a photo of the alleyway with its comical name. I apologise for spoiling the picture, and the lady tells me I suit the name perfectly and I laugh and embrace it: I am trembling madness, I am swirling between jobs, I am writer, I am carer, I am menopause, I am slipping between worlds and finding a way back to myself, and I’ve been doing that forever.

Wendy Pratt, Trembling Madness

Recently, I found myself in the middle seat on a turbulent flight, barely able to move without bumping into my seatmates.

You may know that feeling of foreboding that arrives out of nowhere. I can go months without it, and then, somehow, an accumulation of stresses tips into dread.

Anxiety has endless inventive momentum. No wonder so many writers seem to know it intimately.

So, what did I do to calm my body and mind? I used the in-flight Wi-Fi to look up poems about anxiety.

I’d love to hear which poems resonated most with your experience. And if there’s one I missed, please share it in the comments.

Maya C. Popa, The Poetry of Anxiety

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

Writers are deep observers; I think that quality of being a witness and then writing it is a vital check in society. I’m a yoga teacher and practitioner, and the yoga practice also requires contemplative awareness. I do my best to honor what practicing yoga actually means; according to The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: yogash chitta vritti nirodhah, essentially translates as “yoga is the quieting of all the changing states of the mind.” The primary purpose of this practice is to clear the lens to be in a state of heightened clarity at the present moment. What better conditions exist for poems to emerge than from the place of sheer presence?

8 – Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

ESSENTIAL. The right set of objective eyes, (or a few of them), is essential to crafting and refining poems when the poems are ready for that stage of work. This is part of the journey is a wonderful opportunity for self-inquiry, because it allows me to explore my relationship with ego, want, and attachment. Why am I clinging to this couplet? What makes this image so damn precious to me? What happens if I let go and allow the space for possibility beyond what I originally imagined?

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

Last year, I had the opportunity to study with Ellen Bass on her Truth & Beauty retreat in Santa Cruz with Marie Howe. When I was concerned about about what the poem was uncovering about the person and situation it was based on and feeling guilty about putting all of the mess into the poem, she told me, “Give the poem what it needs.” It was such a declarative moment of wisdom. You can go back after and do all the things to care for the humans who’ve inspired the pieces or think about how the audience will meet the piece, but as the poem is coming to life, don’t hold back. When I head into tough territory around family of origin work, I hear this reminder and charge forward, emboldened and reminded to meet the poem where it is and tend to its needs.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Emily Hyland (rob mclennan)

I don’t write poetry to get reviews or validation but all the same it’s nice when you find out someone likes what you do.

The first written response to my collection Poems In The Key Of Aardvark has appeared on amazon (from a verified sale, it says). So I will, quite shamelessly, quote in full:

“Poetry that reads like a mind passed through a shredder, then carefully reassembled by touch: fragmented, intimate, and full of strange little truths that only reveal themselves when you stop trying to read them normally. Difficult to put this one down.”

I like the idea of my mind passing through a shredder. Seems fair.

And sales are trundling along. Mostly, as far as I can tell, to people who aren’t poets. So far, so good.

Bob Mee, FIRST REVIEW OF POEMS IN THE KEY OF AARDVARK

Sitting down with a copy of Bob Mee’s magnificent Poems In the Key of Aardvark is like tackling a giant trifle with a tiny teaspoon. There’s a lot if it. Gobbled at once, you’ll be sick from here to Christmas. But take your time and you’ll be amply rewarded.

It’s a full fifteen years since Bob’s last outing: The Maker of Glass Eyes, and there’s a sense of making up for lost time – both in the urgency and sheer volume of this new collection.

Some of this work is familiar from the blogosphere, where early versions were first aired. But for me, the poems are more impressive on the page, where print rewards the courage of their convictions.  

When you have a writer as prolific and effortlessly inventive as Bob, it’s easy to miss lines – and sometimes whole poems – that truly resonate and sing.

The trouble is, he can do everything. His trick is accessibility; he’ll draw you in with a casual invitation; sometimes a throwaway line, then lead you somewhere totally unexpected.  

Christopher James, Stop making sense – a review of Poems In the Key of Aardvark by Bob Mee

Or many villages. Whole cities. And today, I want to thank them all.

My brother, Harsha, Vani, and Namratha Varadharajan – for reading the manuscript and giving me the courage to take the next step. And, with Madhuri Katti and Prithvi – for being massive sounding boards as the publishing process almost broke my resolve at every step.

My fellow-poets on WordPress and Blogger – for reading the poems when I posted them in 2022-23. You kept me going for a whole year as the series evolved. I went back several times to read your comments and reviews, when I was drowning in imposter syndrome and self-doubt. And especially Rosemary Nissen-Wade – for the idea, the inspiration and the friend that she is.

Folks at Atta Galatta, one of Bangalore’s premier indie bookstores – for letting me write and edit and sulk at one of their tables, whenever I needed a place away from home. And the good people I meet there – for all the positive energy and support.

Fellow Substackers – for your kind words of support. It encouraged me to bring new poems from here into the book.

And those who have lived through the things in the book with me, all these long years – for quietly providing a shoulder or a willing ear or an anchor, whenever I needed it. You know who you are. This one is for you.

For too long, this book has been unwilling to step out into the world. But here it is now. NWH is out on Amazon India . It will take a few more days for the international listings.

‘No Way Home’ is the dark scab on an old wound. I hope you will welcome it gently into your homes.

Rajani Radhakrishnan, Because it takes a village

I was editing the final version of the upcoming collection of poems and thinking about what holds the book together as a whole. Some of it a twisted version of matrimony and domesticity, but also in some ways, the idea of transformation and monstrosity, which is a place I have visited before obviously with previous books and series, but seems important to take into account with this manuscript in particular. Early American vampires. Murdering governesses. Swampy winged women, and, of course, Bluebeard and his wife (and hidden room full of corpses of brides.) Not that I haven’t written about monstrous women before, though they are usually less malicious. The Renaissance dog-girl of PELT, the sideshow women of GIRL SHOW and EXOTICA. The strangeness of the SWALLOW poems and the female body. These women have a bit more bite behind them. A bit more violence.

Kristy Bowen, women and monstrosity

Having had some time alone at home over the past several days, I watched a lot of bad costume television (Bridgerton Season 4), made progress on a new imaginary landscape painting, pulled a lot of weeds, and spent time combing through my computer files to see how many poems I consider ready to submit or have been published yet uncollected in a book. I figured I’d have twenty or thirty.

Reader, I have one hundred and seven.

How did this happen? When the hell over the past several years have I written over a hundred poems that were not in my last two books?

Donna Vorreyer, Aliens, MRIs, Ouija Boards, Outer Space, and Wild Carrots

We’ve all likely been to a show where no one came. In fact, some of my most wonderfully memorable shows as an attendee have been exactly that—such as seeing one of my favorite bands, Jucifer, perform at the Double Door (RIP) in Chicago to a crowd of less than 10, their wall of amps still reverberating so loud that they knocked over my husband’s beer. And for those of us who are poets and writers, we’ve all likely been on that awkward side of the microphone, staring into a room of just a few good friends or fellow readers, but playing and playing (or reading and reading) just the same.

It can sometimes be so hard to explain this to the authors I work with as a publicist. Just because a bookstore is hosting an event for you doesn’t mean people—particularly people who don’t know you—will come. And just because people come to an event, it does not mean they will buy books. Events are rarely, if ever, about sales. You will not sell enough books to pay for your time and travel (says she who is saving all her tour receipts as a tax deduction for her unprofitable writerly “business”)—even celebrity author tours aren’t known to break even (particularly those that require stylists and handlers and make-up artists).

So, why do we it? Why do we, even at Black Ocean, strongly encourage our authors to team up and get out there?

There is no substitute for the author-in-person—hearing their voice, seeing and feeling why the work matters to them, and having the opportunity to engage with the ideas in the moment, in the flesh. This is not just true of poetry (which one could argue should always be read aloud and has its origins in performance) but of serious nonfiction as well. A scholar’s true enthusiasm for their subject and their research can be infectious.

Events are about visibility and profile raising. Even those who live in a different city or can’t attend the event may see something about it on social or in a newsletter. It puts the book and author into the ether. Those mentions build and compound. A good reading may lead to a review or an interview. It may lead to word-of-mouth recommendations. Or an invite to speak to a class. It may even lead to book sales you don’t see online or a library request.

They are also worth doing just because they are fun. For me, they’ve provided the wonderful opportunity to hang with friends (thank you, Nate Hoks, for the road trip conversation to/from Iowa City), read with writers whose work I love but had never heard aloud before (thank you, Tessa Bolsover, Sadie Dupuis, Sara Wainscott, Jordan Windholz, and Anna Zumbahlen), and to make new friends and support writers and publishers I admire (thank you, Teresa Dzieglewicz and Naoko Fujimoto​).

Carrie Olivia Adams, Readings & Book Events: Do They Matter?

As I move ever deeper into the third print run of Whatever You Do, Just Don’t, I find myself reflecting more and more on the complete irrelevance and absolute significance of sales figures.

Sales are completely irrelevant to me as an objective or target, but on the other hand their growth brings with it an accumulation of readers, who are by far the most important part of my whole creative process. Without a reader’s enjoyment, my poems would seem self-indulgent.

Then there’s the fact that no favour trading or box ticking are involved in someone’s decision to sit down with a collection, and engage with it. The gaining of a reader is by far the greatest award that a poet can win.

I’ve come to believe that slow-burning word of mouth is the most solid, long-lasting way to build a reputation as a poet. Do you agree…?

Matthew Stewart, An accumulation of readers

San Francisco poet Beau Beausoleil has collaborated with Sebastopol artist Tamsin Spencer Smith in this striking volume published on 24th March this year by FMSBW Press. Smith’s bold and expressive abstract paintings face Beausoleil’s poems of love and rage, observation and empathy, across each two-page spread.

Many of the poems are tall and slender, like the trees that hold the sky in place and entwine their roots … nourish each other setting an example of care and co-operation to our divided human society. Beausoleil’s California is a place where night-ships carry darkness under starlight, and urban landscapes interact with a crumbling coastline – a parking space for dreams. The poet’s eye is drawn to wandering streets and … fog-filled trees, highway signs and the scent of the ocean. The poems are sustained by love and fuelled by a fierce grief at human cruelty and destruction.

Ama Bolton, A new book from Beau Beausoleil

I’ve finally got round to cutting the grass today as we’d been doing No Mow May (How deliberate that was is up for debate), but between that and the state of our new allotment (It’s official now…we have the key and have joined the WhatsApp Group for it…) it’s been a week for wrestling with nature, so it was great timing to finish my reading of Graeme Richardson’s debut collection, Dirt Rich, this week.

Dirt Rich followed his New Walk Editions pamphlet, Last of the Coalmine Cowboys, pretty quickly, that being published in 2024. And there’s often a fear with that sort of turnaround that it has been rushed, but a) I’m not going to review a reviewer (who reviews the reviews of a reviewer, etc?) and b) while the collection contains all but 3 of the poems from LotCC, I think this is more a case of accretion of material over time.

Anyhoo, more importantly, I enjoyed it.

Mat Riches, Hardstanding for the bier

In Thistle Kate Maxwell turns a compassionate focus on daily interactions and familiar scenarios. Her poems don’t judge. She illustrates how vital acts of empathy and humanity are in healing connections with others and how to stop short of overdoing it and becoming overwhelmed. Readers are invited to see a thistle not as a prickly weed, but a sign of endurance and resilience. Something that grew where it wasn’t invited but made the best of a hostile environment nonetheless.

Emma Lee, “Thistle” Kate Maxwell (Recent Work Press) – book review

The full-length poetry debut by Edmonton-based poet, artist, educator, translator and researcher Adriana Oniță is Descântec for my Split Tongue: poems (Windsor ON: Palimpsest Press, 2026), a collection of poems that sits amid and between two languages and cultures, even as the author feels her Romanian slip slowly away. “I should have begun by saying / that I lost my mother tongue.” begins the poem “LIMBA MATERNĂ,” early on in the collection, “I know what you are thinking. / How can you lose something / that lives inside of you, unless / you chose to live languageless? // Forgive me, loss never occurs / on purpose. Think of the way / you lose a loved one, or faith.” Her poems speak of a loss still in-progress, with almost a call-and-response element to a number of these poems: offering a line in Romanian that follows in English translation, almost as a kind of reclamation of her mother tongue, but one that sits aside this more recent English comprehension. The poems work to reclaim and, perhaps, to recontextualize, offering alongside this life built fresh in Canada’s prairies. As the poem “PENTRU A FACE ŞI DESFACE / FOR DOING AND UNDOING” writes:

Fă rai din ce ai.
Make heaven from what you’ve got. 

Grăbeşte-te încet.
Hurry slowly. 

Am carat apă la fântână.
I carried water to the well.

The way her two languages, her translations, are set against each other, it suggests not simply to replicate or repeat in English, but composed and translated in a way attempting to shape and articulate that space where both Romanian and English might comfortably meet, within the comfort of her own divided imagination, perhaps. Accompanied by full-colour collages, including those built with photographs from the family archive, Oniță writes to articulate, to claim, to re-claim, setting up a new foundation from which to finally build. I am curious to see what might follow.

rob mclennan, Adriana Oniță, Descântec for my Split Tongue: poems

In Australia his literary reputation, like the man himself, was big enough to block the sun. But to the poets who grew up in Les Murray’s shadow, it was a reputation also composed of conservatism, royalism and patriarchalism. And so, as a young woman coming of age at the University of Technology in Sydney – the epicentre of a metropolitan, sloganeering conformity in the late 80s and early 90s – I deliberately turned away from Murray and his undeniable talent and originality.

Some of my reticence was understandable. Australia still had a frontier, masculine culture, and at first glance Murray’s poems appeared to inhabit that tradition too comfortably. There wasn’t much there for a young feminist to easily identify with. My mentor, Dorothy Porter, was chippy and dismissive of him, and I found it easy to fall in with her point of view.

Here’s another reason for my initial disdain: Murray was the same age as my father, and from a similar background. Working class and a Catholic convert. I was keen to code myself differently at university: sophisticated, worldly, adventurously atheist. I cringe when I think about that younger self.

But as I got older, I realised that Murray was the real thing, and far and away the most talented and original poet Australia has ever produced. When I moved to a rural property three hundred miles north of Murray’s native Nabiac to raise my young son I gained a different perspective on the rhythm of life in a farming community, and a new respect for Murray’s exploration of masculinity, of the Oz cultural cringe, of the harsh realities of Australia’s violent pioneering past – and how its brutality has affected both incomers and indigenous people. His reportage of what it meant to be a motherless working-class boy bullied at school with only a distant and haunted father to watch over him is deeply moving. […]

I remain captivated by his “Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle” – an early attempt to create dialogue between Aboriginal and western ballad traditions, at a time when most white writers were either too frightened or politically paralysed to genuinely engage beyond the usual second-hand slogans and bromides. The political and critical response to the ‘Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle’ over time is salutary. Cultural commentators as diverse as Lisa Gorton (whose review in the Australian Book Review is wonderful), Nam Le, Noel Pearson, Peter Garrett and Clive James all praise the poem. In his excellent essay on Murray in the New York Review of Books J. M. Coetzee calls it an ‘expansive, joyous holiday-season poem’ whose use of the Moon-Bone cycle is ‘a stroke of genius on Murray’s part that is also an act of homage’.

That’s the way I see it: an act of careful, respectful homage written by a man who grew up in a community that was on the very frontier of rural race relations. Where the rubber, along with human skin, hits the road – brutally, and irreversibly: a deeply uncomfortable and heartbreaking place to be, both for indigenous people and the white rural working class; a place of daily experience of the other, while sharing the same environment of poverty and marginalisation; and a very long way from the ‘ought over is’ utopias of the metropolitan universities.

Lisa Brockwell, In the Shade of Les Murray

Just arrived on my doormat is the latest, and second, issue of Free Bloody Birds, a new little magazine ‘printing new poems and essays about poetry’, edited by Alan Jenkins and Declan Ryan. Louis MacNeice turns up several times, which is always a good sign: there he is in Ange Mlinko’s essay on Derek Mahon, in Michael Hofmann’s poem for Michael Longley, and surely he’s somewhere in that fire in Paul Muldoon’s contribution.

And, of course, he’s there in John Clegg’s lovely essay on MacNeice’s London, of which more below. There’s also a superb series of poems by Leontia Flynn (who I wrote about here), an elegy for youth, called ‘Summer’:

Summer is fading
on literary ambition –
on my literary ambition
on the blood-congested drive

to conquer all readers
as not a but the poet,
marmoreal and timeless
to be referenced in every debate;

That first line, which is the first line of each poem, working its way down the page, comes from Larkin’s ‘Afternoons’. Perhaps Larkin was listening to MacNeice too. MacNeice creeps up on you, as I wrote the other day. Here is the beginning of Autumn Journal, the long poem he wrote in 1938:

Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,
Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yew
Insulates the lives of retired generals and admirals…

As FBB’s editors point out, though poets from Belfast and ‘the North’ are keen to claim MacNeice as ‘one of their own’, MacNeice ‘went to school and university’ in England and lived and worked in London ‘almost his entire adult life’. At the same time, John argues in his essay, MacNeice rarely wrote about living in London with the same roving magpie eye for he brought to places like Belfast and Birmingham.

Rather (John writes) ‘MacNeice writes at his best about London — writes, in fact, unforgettably about London — when he is leaving or entering it.’ John’s full explanation is ingenious: I won’t spoil it here. But, as he says, leaving or entering London also means being ‘on the train or on the road’, and MacNeice is the ‘first poet of things seen from that speed’: factories, the backs of houses, rubbish dumps and petrol pumps.

Jeremy Wikeley, Goodbye to London

The extreme musicality of Baudelaire’s “L’invitation au voyage”, emphasised by its very short lines, immediately make me think of Verlaine, but it combines musicality with a robust sensuousness quite unlike Verlaine’s delicate, ethereally elusive effects. In fact it’s above all the sound of the words and the way they make the mouth feel as you say them that makes their images glow so voluptuously in the imagination […]

There’s no point in commenting on the images in detail. Anyone reading the poem aloud or sounding it in his inner ear will both see them and feel how caressingly the poet evokes them in his imagination. The poem unfolds like a song, an incantation that weaves a self-hypnotising spell so that the speaker seems almost to sink into the world he’s imagining. Only almost, though. The refrain both yearns towards this world and accepts its distance. Depending on the emphasis one gives “Là” in reading the poem, this acceptance can seem like something quietly in the background or a sharp reminder of how far the speaker’s actual world is from the order, beauty and pleasure of the imagined one.

Edmund Prestwich, Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage

Searching our postings, I was surprised to see that Eliot is among the poets we have mentioned most often in Poems Ancient and Modern — although the newsletter has featured only three of his poems: “Gerontion,” “La Figlia che Piange,” and “Preludes” (partly because not all his work is out of copyright). Somehow, for us, Eliot remains a touchstone, and if his thought dwelt on a poet — John Webster, for example, or George Herbert — we tend to engage that thought.

A sign of age, perhaps? When Sally Thomas and I were young, Eliot’s poetry was the very horizon of ambitious verse, and high modernism the chief claim of high seriousness, both intellectual and poetic. And that was particularly true among literary and intellectual readers with a religious sense, for whom such work as Eliot’s Four Quartets gave an obvious riposte to the oft-heard sneer that believers are undereducated idiots.

As it happens, when I was starting out as a writer, I took a long lance and charged at this use of Eliot, arguing that God in his poetry is more often a device for addressing the crisis of modernity than an object of faith. The essay was overwrought, as young critics’ work often is, although I think I do still hold that Eliot was doing something intellectually and theologically risky when he took the language of mysticism, which expresses the believer’s rising to the vision of God, and shifted it down the scale to describe the non-believer’s rising to belief.

Perhaps similarly, as the years have gone by, I’ve grown less certain of the idea that Eliot’s poems are puzzles to be solved. Here’s a link to a useful hypertext version of The Waste Land, and in the presentation of Today’s Poem, I’ve placed hors-texte links to Eliot’s own notes. But I have gradually come to think that we might be best served by taking The Waste Land as a toboggan ride rather than, say, a step-by-step guide to forensic accounting. You just climb aboard and try to hang on as it shoots down a bumpy mountain run.

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Waste Land

Come February, maybe, we’ll embark on a study of the “Terrible Sonnets,” the hard-won late-life achievement of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889). But right now, in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway, sumer is icumen in, with all its bursting life, and it seems fitting to turn, yet again, to Hopkins’s own summertime of poetic flourishing. In the spring and summer of 1877, as Hopkins awaited the autumn and his priestly ordination, the sonnets we most readily associate with his name, voice, and vision flowed from him in a great surge: “The Windhover,” “God’s Grandeur,” “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” — and Today’s Poem, “Pied Beauty.”

This poem is one of three examples, in Hopkins, of the “curtal sonnet,” a form devised and named by the poet (the other two are “Peace” and “Ash Boughs”), and distinguished chiefly by its abbreviated length, ten and a half lines instead of the sonnet’s standard fourteen. More precisely, it is like a Petrarchan sonnet whose separate pieces have shrunk in the wash, or like a recipe with two ingredients, reduced proportionately. The Petrarchan octave becomes a sestet; the resolving sestet then consists of a quatrain and a fifth partial line. The rhyme scheme is compressed accordingly. The standard abba quatrain doesn’t repeat itself, but gives way instead to a cdecde sestet, with its first two lines forming the end of the initial stanza, broken after the d-rhyme, which is repeated an extra time in the short closing line.

The form’s compression raises the stakes subtly, requiring the poem to accomplish its Petrarchan wind-up/wind-down thought process in fewer lines, with less room at the end to tie that process off. If Hopkins’s primary fascination was with the mathematics involved in this reduction of the Petrarchan sonnet — he went so far as to work out the formula for paring it down with precision — the consequence, in “Pied Beauty,” is something that eludes quantification.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Pied Beauty

Comprising tightly written found poems as well as persona poems in the form of police “confessions” to the deaths of the African Americans who appeared again and again on our screens, Ligatures [by Denise Miller] draws on the news articles, autopsy reports, and video recordings of and testimonies, verdicts, and sentences in the court cases to establish the undeniable, unsettling, ugly truth of the alternative narratives that Miller offers for Scott and Garner, Rice and McDonald and Steen: systemic racism in the United States, where “black and brown / people’s stories have been spun so quickly and so / thoroughly so that suddenly our lives seem to justify / the ending of them,” exists still. [..]

Just 35 pages long and containing the reported narrative of each death, Ligatures delivers a deserved punch in the gut, restoring what a headline and a hashtag cannot: name, identity, story written by “those people” denied all three.

It is not at all “the child friendly bed time story” Miller acknowledges that some in America wanted then, want even now:

[. . .]

See a picture of a black boy or black girl, a black man
or a black woman, a black person or a black person

and you wonder is she or isn’t she, is he or isn’t he, are they or
aren’t they and each isn’t but each is, you wonder is it another
story of or isn’t it? [. . .]

~ from “Dear Spectators 2: A Bed Time Story” (pp. 33-34)

History — his story, her story, their stories — in Miller’s series of strong and strongly defiant poems is the present we cannot just scroll by. Our shame, Miller makes clear, is so many more names have been, could be, are still being added.

Maureen Doallas, Ligatures by Denise Miller

A poem […] does not make the kind of sense an essay does. The experience a poem invites a reader into—even the experience it leads me through as I write it—is an emotional one; its logic is associative, not discursive. It creates what Susanne Langer calls in Feeling and Form, a “virtual experience,” by which she means that a poem, despite being made from discursive language—syntax, after all, is linear—presents the experience it contains as a whole to be encountered as irreducible to the sum of its parts. “Coitus Interruptus,” in other words, is not a report about my experience with domestic violence. Rather, it offers the reader an opportunity to feel what it was like for domestic violence to have been such an intimate part of my life.

Creating this experience necessarily meant leaving out some details of what actually happened, not because they were unimportant, but because they existed outside the emotional web of that intimacy. For example, not too long after “Mr. Peters” asked me to tape that note to my neighbor’s door, I was telling a friend about everything that had preceded my doing so as we sat talking in my living room after dinner. Suddenly, a male voice came up through the grate covering the space in the wall where my radiator was located. “So you’re the motherfucker who called the cops! You better not let me run into you. You won’t like what happens then.”

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Domestic Violence Has Been A Thread Running Through My Life

I oones fro Westminstir cam,
Vexid ful grevously with thoughtful hete,
Thus thoughte I: ‘A greet fool I am
This pavyment a-daies thus to bete
And in and oute laboure faste and swete,
Wondringe and hevinesse to purchace,
Sithen I stonde out of al favour and grace. –

Thomas Hoccleve (c1420)

The above quote is taken from Hoccleve’s (1368-1420) poem ‘The Complaint’, and it relates a situation that will feel vividly familiar to any member of our contemporary precariat, but especially to those of us grappling for purchase at the ragged edge of End Days Academia. This passage situates the speaker within the unfolding vocational crisis of the late Middle Ages, whereby expanding universities graduated ever more elitely educated clergy, whom the church could not afford to hire into beneficed positions.

There were multiple reasons for this, not least the unscrupulous practice of “pluralism”, where wealthy clerics or papal favourites were allowed to hoard multiple lucrative benefices; hiring out the pastoral overspill to poorly paid and often uneducated surrogates, such as vicars, chaplains, or lesser church officials, while continuing to pocket the juicy tithes. Increased secular interference was also a huge factor. The Catholic church had been greatly weakened (financially and in terms of authority) by the Great Schism; secular monarchs and local lords sought to take advantage of this situation by seizing control over church appointments, selling benefices off to the highest bidder, or simply giving them away to unqualified relatives in order to siphon parish revenue – the bastards.

Reasons aside, the results were clear: a crisis of vocation amongst the clergy, and the creation of what Kathryn Kerby-Fulton in her banging monograph The Clerical Proletariat and the Resurgence of Medieval English Poetry (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021) calls a ‘clerical proletariat’, forced into ever more various, casual, insecure and undignified forms of labour in order to make a living. This new and highly literate proletariat took lowly positions as civil servants, became secretaries in great houses, office-clerks, jobbing liturgical labourers, itinerant scribes and – according to Kerby-Fulton’s thesis – poets.

I’ll admit, I hadn’t thought about it in these terms before: but this new social class simply saw more opportunities for writing in English because they were working for – and uncovering an audience amongst – the laity. The implications of this, in terms of determining a kind of proletarian poetics are huge: the opportunity to address proletarian themes directly; to carve out for this clerical proletariat a distinct subjectivity and realm of concern, as Chaucer does through his characters – especially the Clerk of Oxenford and the Parson – in the Canterbury Tales; as Hoccleve does through his striking first-person confessional in ‘The Complaint’, and as a roused and radical Langland does through scorching critique in Piers Plowman, with its defence of the poor and its attack on corrupt labour laws and church hierarchy. Fun fact here: the rebels of 1381 are known to have used pseudonyms, including that of Langland’s titular character “Piers Plowman”, so you have a really solid example of the way the poetry of the clerical proletariat is not merely reflecting but influencing/ imagining into being a political and literary proletarian community. Woo-hoo!

Why am I telling you this? Because Hoccelev’s despair has often, over the last couple of years, been my own, and because the situation in which he found himself resonates so profoundly with the crisis engulfing academia in Space Year 2026: there are fewer and fewer permanent positions; the universities themselves seek to outsource more pedagogic labour to adjuncts, associates, and sessional tutors. We’re highly skilled and highly qualified, but we will face chronic underemployment/ unemployment as a result of both over-qualification (ahem) and – it has to be said – a raft of unethical practices inherent to a profit driven university system that has chugged the ghastly orange Kool-Aid of business ontology down in one.

I dearly want to find these parallels comforting; to take them as proof that this too shall pass, but how I actually feel about it can be summed up in the rather more sobering assessment that history repeats, corruption endures, and that we learn – that we continue to learn – absolutely nothing. What I do take courage from is precisely the resurgence that Kerby-Fulton’s book identifies. Before resurgence must come recognition: that is, the abandoning of internalised aspirational bullshit; learning to know ourselves (myself) again as a member of the sweaty, striving, vitally alive proletariat. What do we/ I sound and think like when not staging our subjectivity for an elite – downward and outward-looking – audience, but when we are, in fact, talking to and imagining among ourselves? What kinds of speech and formal tactics might be ours? What is the new vernacular? The new idiom? The language of our intellectual laity?

Fran Lock, Hoccleve/ Hedge Schools/ Rude Bootlegs

the bee’s buzz—
another path
into thoughts

embrace by tom clausen

Last fall, one of my poems, “Confessions of a Former Scarecrow,” was featured as part of Prairie Schooner’s Intern Picks series. I’m grateful to have the poem receive that attention and wanted to share it again here as I continue thinking about looking, attention, and transformation in relation to my upcoming workshop.

You can read the feature here:
Prairie Schooner Intern Picks Fall Feature

And the poem here:
“Confessions of a Former Scarecrow”

Here is a stanza from the poem:

I’m not a man but a wariness,
a warning to keep clear of the field.
I stand, friendless—what friends, tell me,
are apple trees, a trail of leaves,
the wasted weather, these apples worn
to a sun-brown, and then just brown,
a rot and musk—everyone reeks
to me, no man, half-made of air.

Returning to this stanza now, I’m struck by the way the speaker looks out from a transformed state. The poem does not simply describe a scarecrow; it lets the speaker become a field of wariness, warning, weather, rot, and air. The act of looking here is shaped by estrangement. The speaker sees from the edge of personhood, or from a place where personhood itself feels unstable.

That feels connected to some of the questions behind my upcoming workshop, “Look / Mira: Latinx/e Ways of Looking in Poetry & Prose.” What happens when looking is not neutral? What happens when the gaze is shaped by memory, body, place, fear, language, or transformation? How might a poem or essay allow us to see from a position we could not otherwise name?

I’m interested in writing that lets looking become more than description. Looking can become pressure. Refusal. Witness. Inheritance. A way to survive. A way to change shape.

José Angel Araguz, three invitations to look

The day after my online book launch, I got up at 4.30am to get a taxi to the airport to go to Cork International Poetry Festival. I was there for four glorious days – and met so many fantastic poets and writers. If I was cast out from Yorkshire, I would probably run away to Cork. It’s one of my favourite places in the world. If any of you are thinking of a poetry holiday next year – and by poetry holiday, I mean those ones where you gather your poetry friends and descend on a poetry festival, then do think about going to Cork. The programme is always amazing, and is truly international – plenty of Irish poets but also poets from around the world. The readings go on all day and most of the night and you could quite safely go on your own and end up with friends for life by the end of the first reading.

I was very excited to be reading with Annemarie Ní Churreáin on Saturday night – she is a fantastic poet, and author of one of my favourite contemporary poems A Hymn to All Restless Girls – now the title poem of her latest collection, published by Gallery Press.

I’d bought thirty copies of the House with me, and sold twenty six books at the reading, and then one for cash in the bar afterwards, so I only had two take home with me!

Kim Moore, More Adventures with the House

I always think I need more time to write and when I have it, it suddenly seems hard to focus. But this week I sketched a poem about students finding my poetry on the internet. They’ve googled me which seems a waste, but  there’s definitely worse things out there. The fact that they chanted lines of my poetry back at me on the last day of school as some kind of taunt just tickled me. I had to write about it. They read poetry willingly, even memorised it. That has to be something to be proud of. […]

My desire to try and get published may be almost gone, but not my love of writing. So in between lesson planning, coursework, piles of laundry, mowing, feeding and negotiating with my kids, I try to write poetry. I play with words and images, I attempt to capture my moments in this world on the page. 

And I don’t press publish on this blog to reach the masses or even a trickle of readers, but for myself. To see the entries sketch my thoughts across the years, to document my highs and lows, my random thoughts, my cycling through the seasons. 

I write to find my way through.

Gerry Stewart, Writing for No Reward

[A] couple of days ago, we visited Luna Parc, which is quite an experience. It is a handmade house, sculpture garden, and studio that Ricky Boscarino has been working on for decades. A Rhode Island School of Design student fascinated by silver-smithing, Boscarino decided early on that he wanted to make a living doing art. He began by making unusual (and sometimes slightly alarming) jewelry and creating art from found objects. He’s also a painter, ceramicist, welder, woodworker…and trying to make his housing needs, studio, and life as sustainable as possible in the wooded region near Stokes State Park in New Jersey. Now, the place is a non-profit that trains students, sponsors art interns, and continues to grow and morph into, well, who knows? He’s devoted his life to art-making. And the place is really fun to explore.

Talk about inventive!

It’s something people need to do, have an urge to do–invent stuff for some purpose, to solve a problem, for enjoyment, or out of a need to play around; we are, as Huizinga says, Homo Ludens (see this post!). Play leads to all kinds of things, piqued by curiosity and that urge to fiddle with things. The patent models at Hagley were behind glass, but I was itching to play with them, like a five-year-old.

That is what I like about writing poetry, too, the play and invention of it–using words, images, sounds, patterns. Earlier today I was messing around with quatrains that used rhyme/slant rhyme line endings, switching off between ABBA and ABAB by stanza. The poem’s content isn’t cheerful, yet puttering with possible patterns was fun and kept me thinking about the topic. Then I went inside and put Bach’s Inventions & Sinfonias on the stereo.

Ann E. Michael, Invention

Working in the arts is tough going, and classes are clear in America. I think it’s hard to understand how much physical and mental labor and hours go into making books. It’s long hours. There are people who look down on those of us who work. Some people refuse to get their hands dirty, and I wouldn’t know how to step into their mindset. I have respect for all kinds of labor, whether it’s medicine, law, building houses, or kelp farming.

I could not walk into a room and pretend to be a lawyer or a stockbroker or an arbitrageur. But neither could a suit walk into our lives and paint or plant a garden or build something. I have painted and gardened and trained horses. My husband and son can do most of the trades—plumbing, carpentry, tile; my son redid my whole bathroom when the floor collapsed. We are in the substance of the world, building culture.

Which is why I want to keep the press going. I like books. I like arguing about them. When friends disagree with my thoughts on a book, I love those conversations, because I’m still in the swim of a story.

It’s late, and I need to sleep. In stress and exhaustion, I am not operating at my best, but when I wake up, the dinosaur will still be in the room—the ridiculous Kate—and what do I do with her? And the press hanging on by its fingernails, and the people who are upset with me, and all the problems I can’t fix.

Kate Gale, Waking Up to the Dinosaur: Finding Our Story of Survival

When we pick and gather, wash, chop,
stir then eat and drink, there’s almost
always a sense of ceremony. From
the holy trinity of onions, garlic, and
tomatoes to the background strains
of gingery broth, bitter greens and
tamarind pucker, any improvisation
is inspired by those who taught us:
before you reach for your portion,
shake some droplets on the ground,
ladle an offering into a bowl.

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

This week the thing that I read which kept me Alive (as opposed to just living) was the transcript of an interview between James Shaheen and Li-Young Lee on Tricycle. Like, dig this:

“For me, there’s only three postures of the soul when you’re writing a lyric poem. They can be summed up as “Oh my God,” “Oh my love,” and “Holy, holy, holy.” You know, when I experience something and I feel, “Oh my God,” I mean, I know I have to write about it. When I experience something like, “Oh, my love,” I have to write about it. Or when I see and feel something that inspires in me, “Holy, holy, holy.” Those three are the postures of awe. Adoration, I don’t know who said it, but adoration is the proper attitude of a soul in awe. And it seems to me that the lyric poem is the greatest expression of awe and adoration, turning about one thing, and that thing is unknown. I feel like I live in those three postures all day long.”

So this is what’s getting me through. Thinking about the three postures of awe. Thinking about adoration. And repeating in my head the words, holy holy holy. Also, he talks about the line of a poem being a form of trembling. When you speak a poem, when you speak, “the vocal cords are trembling.”

Poetry is not going away, awe is not going away, trembling is not going away. The holy holy holy is not going away.

I think, I imagine, what will happen next is that the realms will just get further apart. They were always apart, and I don’t know why. Because why do you want to be a human living in this world, and separate yourself from art, and joy, and beauty, and philosophical thought, and the depths of the creative experience. I think back to taking what now seems like a truly wondrous undergrad degree in the humanities, and how the arts were always pitted against the business and science faculties. That was so weird to me. I always craved more cross pollination, people-wise. Which I guess is why I worked in the science library when I was at university doing my English Honours degree. (Which I received with honours, might I add, because what the hell). My co-workers were largely science and engineering students and we had the most interesting conversations.

We get to pick our posture every day. And the thing to do is to remember. You put on your coat, your shoes. Put on your posture of awe, too. Holy holy holy, oml omg.

Shawna Lemay, Holy holy holy

And here’s a poem from Magnifying Glass which captures a moment from childhood when I was stung for the first time…

STUNG

If it was a wasp
it stung once and fled,

if it was a bee
I didn’t see it die.

I stood naked
gazing at a splinter;
a black spine centred in a pink circle.

I pushed my stomach out to watch what next,

alone and naked in a field I saw
it redden concentrically as I stared.

I held out my arms to the summer air

let my lungs expel their cry.

Sue Finch, A PERSON FLYING THEIR HORSE ON THE BEACH

We had some family stuff that happened that reminded me that life is not steady, that change is the only constant, and sometimes, those changes are not the changes we’d choose. Parents getting older, our worrying about them, and my own body, struggling with what can be several debilitating problems at once, realizing we don’t have forever, and neither do those we love. It can push us into depression or push us to try to make the best of every day we have. It’s also realizing that although right now is hard, we’re not having as bad a time as we had in the past—reading from Flare, Corona always reminds me that I had some of the worst news and the worst health of my life when I wrote that book, and I survived a terminal cancer diagnosis and an MS diagnosis and severe flare almost a decade ago now. We lose things in life—our memories, our ability to run or walk, our balance, money, security, loved ones—and we have a choice, to continue on or to stay in mourning or lament our inability to trust and secure our lives exactly the way we want them to be. Sure, the world can feel like it’s in constant apocalypse right now. But we have a choice in what we do every day with that. What do you do with your last day on earth? Why, write another poem, of course.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Reading with Kelli in Shoreline, Goldfinches, Hummingbirds, Woodpeckers, and Losing Things

this is my huge giant flower face. this is my
handful of hair. this is my rocket collection.
when i reach the moon i am going to put
my ear to the surface & listen.

Robin Gow, 6/4

This week: a sequestered egg, phrenology’s adhesiveness, the rustle of blood, dancing chickens, and much more. Enjoy.

This morning the air brings the rustle of rain soon and the vague scent of vanilla biscuits.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a person holding a book in front of a bookshelf. Indeed it is, and that person is me and the book that I have temporarily removed from its space on the shelf in Waterstones is Welcome to the Museum of a Life published by Black Eyes Publishing UK. And the fact it is written by me, and it is there makes my heart dance a little happy dance.

In my ponderings this week I thought about blue moons, and I found out that maybe the blue moon at the end of May meant there have been forty-two blue moons since I was born. And whether there have or there haven’t this ‘fact’ along with the realisation that I hadn’t got a blue moon poem in amongst my moon poems inspired me to get writing. I donned my ‘Poetry in Business’ t-shirt and started to draft.

Sue Finch, FORTY-TWO BLUE MOONS

this heat, dear god. this room. a tranquillised diplomacy. refrain is bottlenecked inside the throat. i float, infused, transfigured; so pink and smooth: sequestered egg. i dream, such dreams! my cloudy raptures overrun. i must wake up. to wane of nations, whine of wealth, wax of sun; the clean and reachy flight of birds, white birds. those deadly vestal things are women in accomplished dresses, sweeping up and down. not i. an egg does not aspire to flight.

Fran Lock, LE SPECTRE DE LA ROSE

All week I’ve had a book with a broken spine cracked open in my study. (Which could be how it came apart in the first place). It’s a well-loved book, as so many of mine are, and becoming more beloved all the time. This is Another Beauty by Adam Zagajewski.

I’ve been doodling in the mornings, with and without words. What can I say, it’s the therapy I can afford and there are worse methods to get one’s s-h-i-t together. One of the phrases that comes up is one of my favourite lines from AZ:

“It’s not time we lack, but concentration.”

Shawna Lemay, …that summer was just about over

As a full-time writer, I sometimes work a 16-hour day, and still there are tasks not completed, and still there is no time to write poetry. I hardly ever have weekends off; I do most of my creative writing and editing on holiday, or late at night when I should be asleep. How do you let your words run wild if you’re earning less than the minimum wage, or if you have to get a first in your creative writing MA to justify the course fees and the time away from other priorities? How do you let go when you don’t understand the poem that everyone loves, or you have to write a poem-a-day, or what you most urgently want to say might lead to sweeping judgements in the poetry world, might even get you cancelled? When everyone is arguing, and you’ve been rejected again, and no-one will publish the book you’ve been working on for years, when you take your precious poem to a workshop and everyone finds something they want you to change, how then do you write freely and truly from your own heart?

And perhaps just as crucially, what can we do as a community, as readers, as friends and writers and peers, and teachers and mentors, competition judges, event organisers, publishers and editors, to support the wildness in each other? How can we shape the environment in which we create poetry, to encourage and sustain its wild heart?

Clare Shaw, Return to the Wild

Are you a poet with a chapbook or full-length collection that came out in 2025 or 2026, or is coming out in 2027? I created a spreadsheet to help poets with new books find each other for readings, events, collaborations, regional connections, and general book-launch camaraderie in this circus of book promo. Email me at kelli (at) agodon (dot) com and I’ll send you the link so you can add your book and info, to find other poets with books coming into the world around the same time. […]

Poetry Book Recommendation: The New Economy by Gabrielle Calvorocessi. I know, I won’t stop talking about this book. This is the first poem of the book—you can decide if you’d like more of this voice. I honestly can’t get enough of Gaby’s poems and rereading it again.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Terry Gross Wants to Interview Me! and Other Things AI Made Up

Two things. Firstly, the ‘Guide to Getting your Poetry Published’ is out in the world (literally: orders from Canada, Singapore, Sweden, France, India …) so that’s one big project finished. And thank you to Thomas Ovans for his review of the book on London Grip.

Secondly, I’m now setting myself a ‘poem a day’ challenge to get some work in the bag. OK, it hasn’t been every day exactly, but I’ve made a good start, and I’m back on it once I’ve written this post. Writing went out the window for a few days while our little choir the Lewes Singers were in Winchester singing the weekend services. Turned out the cathedral was the only cool place in town, in fact I got really cold a couple of times while it was over 30 degrees outside! I also met up with a friend for a visit to Jane Austen’s house in Chawton. Although I’ve been there before, it’s still a lovely place to revisit, very atmospheric and quite moving to be reminded of Jane’s short and somewhat unlucky life. […]

A couple of weeks ago Peter Kenny and I launched a new episode of Planet Poetry, this time featuring poet and children’s author Mara Bergman. It’s already proving to be a popular episode. Our next interviewee will be Will Harris, in the last new episode of this season. But there will be at least one, maybe two archive interviews released over the summer. Scaling back the number of new shows this season while keeping the poddy going has suited both Peter and myself, in that we’ve both had the time and energy to work on other projects.

Robin Houghton, Quick round-up of poetry & other happenings

Last month, I revived our monthly poetry thread for subscribers, and I could not be more glad that I did.

What I witnessed this month was a reminder of the care, decency, and thoughtfulness at the heart of poetic practice. I watched strangers comment generously on one another’s poems, sharing how and why they were moved. I saw vulnerability and candor that wasn’t performed, just human.

I also read some really, really good poems I would not have encountered otherwise.

One of the pleasures of putting together this selection was the range of subjects, registers, and approaches. I found poems in strict forms, poems inventing their own forms, and poems unfolding in lively streams of consciousness. There were poems about grief and loss, of course, but also many rooted in appreciation and pleasure.

I’ve tried to reflect some of that range in my curation—and, as usual, I’ve tried to link the poems up by echoes in their motifs. My selection is idiosyncratic rather than comprehensive, but please know how much I enjoyed reading your work even if I didn’t include your poem. And please know there’s always next month.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

I wasn’t actually going to post this week, but

1. I have to say a huge thanks to Tim at Crooked Spire for a great evening last Sunday and the last event for the Fig Tree 2025 Anthology.

2. And I have to say a hugerer thank you to the wonderful Katie Griffiths for inviting me to read at the Riverhouse Barn (Michelle Penn and Tom Sastry coming up soon – go, go!!) on Thursday just gone. It was a wonderful evening of readings from Alwyn Marriage and the 4 open mic folks..And Katie’s own poem at the start (I think it was called Arrival) was glorious and very moving.

A huge thanks to Katie’s partner, Cris, for the lift to and from the station…and to everyone that came. Part of the evening was an interview ons stage. I’ll not lie, I was more nervous about this than any other part of the night, but I was out at ease and it was lovely to hear Katie say she enjoyed these blogs and my work. She’s certainly given me lots to think about in terms of using some of the gubbins I post here in poems. I gave myself something to think about by saying I should stop writing these and use the time on poems instead…We’ll see.

I look forward to Katie’s new collection, Mindset Mindrise due out this year, and commend The Attitudes (her previous collection to you now).

Finally, more gigs where you’re gifted a mug afterwards please.

Mat Riches, It meant allotment to me

Well, I was supposed to spend the last week on the San Juan Island at a writing residency. The first day was glorious – beautiful warm sunshine, seal heads bobbing in the water, and my first ever real-life encounter with baby foxes! The second day was cold and rainy, but I got a lot of reading and some writing done. The third day, sadly, I woke up with my jaw swollen from a tooth infection (root canal next week!) with fever and it was determined that I should probably get home so I could rest, get antibiotics and move up my root canal. […]

Here is the rising of the Blue Micromoon of May, which is slightly smaller AND a rare second full moon of the month. Apparently, all weird moons are signs of health doom for me, so I should really pay more attention to them (see many blog posts where weird supermoons coincide with unexpected trips to the hospital.) Should have paid attention to that horoscope!

Anyway, one thing I did get to do during the residency besides writing a new fox poem was look over my manuscript, and you know what? I had the strong feeling that, at this point, I could make it different, but I could not make it better. I definitely had the feeling it was time to send that manuscript out and start on a new project at last.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rough Week with Blue Minimoon, Baby Foxes, Tooth and Rib Drama, and Summer Approaches

It’s beginning to flood, my foot
on the brakes falling straight to the floorboard
as water rises, the car floating slowly
amidst a cache of litter, planks,
a garbage can, and a blue tricycle.
Out of control, I let the waffling
steering wheel go, lean back with a Hail Mary
on my lips and think about wading
to the nearest bar for a screw-it-all beverage.

Charlotte Hamrick, May Listopia 2026

Of course time has dimmed my memories, and no doubt shifted them as well. What I remember is a blogging community, people whom I met only online, who helped and encouraged me. 

Some of you are still here. I wasn’t, for a few years. I see the vacancies in the resurrected blog, the months of silence. No doubt I was silent elsewhere, too; silent on the blogs of my WWW friends. 

Now, I miss it. All of it. The community, the fresh excitement of meeting someone new, someone interesting, a new way of making language, new thinking, new art. New eyes. 

We built something. Now I discover that I was not the only one to fade. I learn that blogrolls are obsolete, that writers no longer exchange links and comments and follows that lead, eventually, to more of the same. 

I learn that nostalgia is a kind of grief. 

the buddha in the window well
wet with spring rain
remembers snow, its white shawl

Sharon Brogan, W.W.W. Nostalgia

I was seventeen, and blinded by youth: by my grandiosity and timidity. I wavered, as boys do nowadays, between thinking myself extraordinary and thinking myself worthless; but I didn’t recognize that about myself. So why Homer’s story of a fatherless boy setting out to discover whether he actually has a heritage (and whether it is ever coming home to save him) would move me, was mysterious to me. But move me it did.

I did know some things. I was reading the classics for the first time, and they were legible! So there was a heritage, it was a real thing, and I was up to receiving it! That, at least, I understood at the time.

But another thing that happened to me, I did not realize. It happened sotto voce. I was reading poetry for the first time. It was my great good fortune that I was given the Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s translation: I was reading a master of English iambic pentameter. My ear was wholly untrained then. I was only vaguely aware that it was poetry, at first. I knew that that ragged right margin was supposed to signal something special, some elevation or sonority or affectation, but I didn’t really know what it was. So I just read it as though it were prose, galloping along, puzzling out the meaning. It was exceptionally clear language, very easy to grasp at first sight, but I was very young and very uneducated, and reading it at all was an athletic achievement. I was proud of it, and rightly so. So many foreign names, alien customs, weird locutions, puzzling repetitions! I marched through it, like Sherman’s troops through Georgia.

And something was happening besides the story. I was absorbing the fundamental rhythm of English poetry. I was learning it in probably the best, if not the most efficient way: just by reading it, line after line. When I read Shakespeare for the first time, later that year, I had a leg up: I already understood implicitly how this thing worked, how it steered, how you breathed when you read it. Poetry will eventually teach you how to read itself, if you give it time, and grant it authority.

Dale Favier, On First Looking into Fitzgerald’s Homer

In the ninth month of his forty-first year, readying the third edition of Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman sat down to compose what we, ahistorical in our lexicon, might consider his coming out. Titled “Calamus” after Acorus calamus — a tall wetland flowering plant native to his birthplace, Long Island, the sand-duned end of America, also known as sweet flag for its strong erect leaves and solid cylindrical spadix — this would always remain his most overtly erotic lyric sequence, the one in which he included his elegy for his New Orleans heartbreak. The sequence is often referred to as Whitman’s “homoerotic” epic — a definition narrowed not only to sexuality alone but to a sexuality that exists solely as an antipode of the heteronormative paradigm. Such a reading flattens the substance to the surface, for the “Calamus” poems are Whitman’s love poems—his only overt love poems. Among them is a short meta-poem vibrating with the vulnerability of writing these verses at all:

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

But while Whitman boldly celebrated his intimate sympathies in verse, he remained restive about them and sought to fathom himself through what he, along with his generation, thought to be science. Again and again, Whitman returned to phrenology’s amativeness and adhesiveness, charging his poetry of contrasts with this battery of words, locating his own coordinates in relation to them, making sense of the world, making sense of himself in relation to the world and of the world’s totality in relation to its multitudes. Out of the language of a pseudoscience, he sculpted a new vocabulary of elemental personal truth. In the “Calamus” poems, he dares imagine in the public plane what felt so intolerable on the personal — not only the total acceptance of his nature, but its consecration of an entire species of love:

For I am the new husband, and I am the comrade.
And this, O this shall henceforth be the token of comrades, this calamus-root shall,
Interchange it youths, with each other! There shall from me be a new friendship —
It shall be called after my name.

How much more poetic it would be to call ourselves Whitmanic or Waltean rather than homosexual or bisexual or queer or any other term etymologically rooted not in the lush wetlands of nature but in the strangeness, the otherness of the counternatural, describing us not by what we are but by what we are not.

Maria Popova, How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love

Now published, my translation of the great German poet Jürgen Becker’s 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Shearsman Books have done a marvellous job with this book. The poems are introduced by a brilliant essay by Lutz Seiler (also in my translation) and an extract from Becker’s early statement of literary intent, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’ (1964). I love the choice of cover image: the receding blue remembered hills evoking the way Becker’s poems layer, and intermingle, the past and present of his life and his country’s history so seamlessly. Becker’s work is hugely admired in Europe but almost unknown over here (and in the USA). […]

In her Afterword to Jürgen Becker’s monumental 1000-page Gesammelte Gedichte (2022), Marion Poschmann praises the poet as being ‘the writer of his generation who has most consistently exposed himself to the work of remembrance, who approaches the repressed with admirable subtlety and is able to reconcile his personal biography with the great upheavals of history.’  Becker grew up in the German region of Thuringia which, after World War II, was in the Soviet occupation zone, later the GDR. By then, his family had moved to West Germany and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Becker often returned to his childhood landscape.

It is, in part, such biographical happenstance that has made Becker a poet of historical change which, as he says in the poem ‘Dressel’s Garden’, is ‘not yet / a completed process’. The poems achieve their ambitious goals through a layering of time periods, a multiplicity of voices, strands of association and networks of memory. He collages fragments and juxtaposes elements of everyday speech, popular music, neutral description, higher tones, and historical quotation. What holds the poems together are recurring leitmotifs, focal points of personal and historical memory, familiar places, to such a degree that it is ‘possible to read 17 volumes totalling 1000 pages as a single, enormous poem’ (Poschmann). […]

Selecting from the 1000-page poem that Poschmann envisages would be difficult indeed, so I have chosen to present the whole of Becker’s crucial 1993 collection, Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and reunification the following year, this is the collection in which Becker explores his relationship with his own childhood in Thuringia and the continuing impact of the Second World War and the division of Germany. I have also included a substantial extract from Becker’s important 1963 lecture, ‘Against the Conservation of the Literary Status Quo’, because it suggests clearly the poet’s dissatisfaction with the literary forms of that time and his belief that a form of ‘journalling’ was to be his own way forward. Becker’s baggy, comprehensive, allusive, meditative, brilliantly detailed poems (surely at their best at length) can also be viewed as a response to Czeslaw Milosz’s lines in the 1968 poem ‘Ars Poetica?’: ‘I have always aspired to a more spacious form / that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose’ (tr. Milosz and Lillian Vallee). These then are poems of great historical importance, but my interest in them has also been sustained by the belief that they are extraordinary technical achievements and present an extension of the concept of what makes a poem, an extension too long absent from the English language poetry world.

Martyn Crucefix, Now Published: ‘Foxtrot in the Erfurt Stadium’ by Jürgen Becker

Longing in Dream Logic is not confined to romantic or interpersonal scenarios; it also takes the form of grief, where desire is directed toward the impossible recovery of the dead. In several poems centred on the speaker’s grandparents, memory becomes both a consoling and destabilising force. Echo Wood is especially effective in this regard. The poem revisits shared habits and private rituals—guessing the wood of a banister, smoking roll-ups—not as anecdotal detail alone but as traces through which intimacy is preserved after loss. Since her grandfather’s death, the speaker explains that ‘she likes to haunt’ the places associated with him because ‘it feels as if a part of you is still there, a bit of your soul left behind.’ The language of haunting is crucial here. It registers grief as a condition in which the boundaries between presence and absence become porous, and in which the mourner herself assumes a spectral relation to the world. Bosman intensifies this instability through the refrain ‘Perhaps- perhaps’, a phrase that suspends the poem between disbelief and yearning. Logic gives way to wish, but the wish is structured by grief’s need to imagine continuation. In this sense, the collection’s dream logic is nowhere more affecting than in its treatment of bereavement, where emotional truth depends not on factual certainty but on the persistence of attachment.

These recurring concerns—unrealised possibility, anxiety, failed agency, and grief—give Dream Logic a notable conceptual coherence. Bosman’s references to Emily Dickinson, Emily Brontë, and Sylvia Plath help to situate that coherence within a wider poetic lineage, though the collection does not merely imitate its forebears. One might locate Bosman between Dickinson’s inward metaphysical attentiveness, Plath’s psychological intensity, and Brontë’s emotional extremity, yet her work remains distinct in tone and method. Where those predecessors often move toward crisis, revelation, or visionary confrontation, Bosman is more interested in quieter forms of disturbance: hesitation rather than rupture, lingering attachment rather than rebellion, emotional afterlife rather than dramatic catharsis. Her landscapes, accordingly, are less sites of sublime struggle than repositories of memory and projection. What emerges from the collection is an understated but persuasive poetics of frustration, in which the mind returns compulsively to what it has lost, feared, or failed to realise. As a debut, Dream Logic demonstrates not only technical control but a sustained interest in the forms through which interior life becomes thinkable and speakable.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Dream Logic’ by Satya Bosman

As with other Italian imports, such as olives and spaghetti, I sometimes feel have an endless appetite for sonnets. So another anthology is always welcome, and this week I’ve been reading Paul Muldoon’s Scanty Plot of Ground: A Book of Sonnets (Faber, 2025). It’s an enjoyable buffet of small plates; one discovery I was glad to make was “The Shepherd Boy” by John Clare, which, like many sonnets, seems to tell a story about its own playful ability to imagine riches in a confined space (the book’s title comes from Wordsworth: “‘twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground”) […]

As with most poetic miscellanies, closer inspection reveals some scantiness in the table of contents. For a writer whose own inventively pararhymed sonnets have been so influential on contemporary poetry, Muldoon is surprisingly uninterested in the range of modern experiment with the possibilities of the fourteen-liner out there, and surprisingly keen on nineteenth-century poets with only a minor claim to significance in sonnet history. Robert Browning, for example, was not a notable sonnet writer — unlike his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning — yet not only does he get in with a sort-of-sonnet comprising two seven-line stanzas, but also features in two other tributes: Swinburne’s “A Sequence of Sonnets on the Death of Robert Browning” and Landor’s “To Robert Browning”. For this week’s post, then, I thought I’d pick seven sonnets passed over by Muldoon, which would be in my own imaginary anthology.

Jeremy Noel-Tod, Pinks #43: A Swirling Chain

If literary history is defined by the great writers who seem to mark its eras, what do we say of those whom time has largely forgotten: the quieter, more idiosyncratic voices who never quite rise to the surface, let alone manage to stay there? We call them minor, lacking a more precise term for the writer who falls short, somehow, of a Shakespeare, a Donne, or a Wordsworth. And perhaps it’s true of that writer’s vision, that it is smaller and less striving, that it doesn’t aspire to the level of the epic. Still, even a small vision may, in its way, contain its share of multitudes.

Consider the example of Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845–1907). “Who?” you might say, and well you might — though some of you might recall the poet and critic Daniel Galef’s piece on Lee-Hamilton’s chilling “Queen Eleanor to Rosamund Clifford,” which ran here a year ago last March. But largely, except to scholars of the Victorian era and those who remember him as the endower of a still-ongoing literary prize at Oxford and Cambridge, Lee-Hamilton has lapsed into an undeserved obscurity.

Educated in France and Germany, he served in various diplomatic positions before abruptly and inexplicably, at the age of twenty-eight, losing the use of his legs. He spent much of his adult life in Italy, a semi-invalid under his mother’s care, producing his body of poetic work between bouts of illness and what the doctors termed “nervous prostration.” His interest as a poet inclined to the historical dramatic monologue, as in the imagined address of Eleanor of Aquitaine to the mistress of her husband, Henry II, whom Eleanor loves, as Daniel Galef has written, “the way the viper loves the dove.” In these dramatic monologues, Lee-Hamilton manages to channel not only the Victorian monologue-master, Robert Browning, but also the sonnet mastery of that poet’s wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

A master of the sonnet in his own right, Lee-Hamilton deserves our renewed notice. Today’s Petrarchan sonnet, small as it is, strikes a resonant note of large existential disillusionment. The beautiful, evocative sound that the seashell returns to the ear is not the sound of the sea, but the rustle of our own blood, which we tell ourselves is the sea. If this sonnet’s vision is one of debunked hope, posing the false promise of the shell’s sea-sound as a figure for the emptiness of the idea of heaven, still the poem is as beautiful and beguiling, even in its despair, as the illusory sound of the sea in a shell.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: Sea-Shell Murmurs

The latest full-length poetry collection since her remarkable Griffin Prize-winning poetry title, Quarrels (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] is Victoria poet Eve Joseph’s, Dismantling (Anvil Press, 2026), a book-length suite of deft, single-stanza prose poems. Her fourth published poetry collection, Dismantling is set in two untitled sections, the second of which is a suite of twenty-six numbered poems, each titled “cento.” “The shades above the city have already been drawn,” begins the first numbered “cento,” “the pockets of wind emptied. The room is quiet now, everything falling at the same rate of speed.” There’s a part of me still frustrated at how her work so quietly floats just under the radar, having only been introduced to her work at all through her third collection, and missing completely her first two—The Startled Heart (Oolichan Books, 2004) and The Secret Signature of Things (London ON: Brick Books, 2010)—although one might say what keeps her just under the radar is exactly the strength of her quietly powerful lyric. “All history is revisionist.” begins the poem “revisions,” “Dig down and there’s so and so with his version of events. A little further and you can hear the song of the last speckled cormorant and before that the ancestors of Przewalski’s horses no bigger than foxes. What’s the point of one more poem?” As part of her contribution to “short takes on the prose poem” over at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics in 2022, she wrote: “I love prose poetry. There is something about the shape of the form that encourages ranging thought at the same time it demands concise imagery. It is a loping wolf that places each paw precisely.”

Composed across firm and precise lines, set with such a delicate touch, Joseph’s poems are masterfully written, perfectly held together, even through an ongoing conversation around how easily things fall apart. This is a collection of form and attention, carefully layered and precise. As the poem “the hour before dawn” begins: “How many silences penetrate other silences? The monk with his vows. A violin at rest in its black case. Two of Adelaide Crapsey’s three: the falling snow, the mouth of one just dead. Not the dying or the death itself but the wide-open O of the moment. The breath gone from the lungs yet still in the room.”

rob mclennan, Eve Joseph, Dismantling

Entire years of your life will blur together, or be forgotten. Eventually, some effort to rescue what is left becomes necessary, and some reckoning with its meaning becomes possible. The poems in The Discarded Life [by Adam Kirsch] are such an effort.

One of the poems’ pleasures is how well they evoke a time and place. We are in Southern California, in the early 1980’s. (I grew up there in the same decade.) The Muppets, Atari games, and Sesame Street all make appearances, against the almost-imperceptible gradations of climate that that place calls “seasons”:

The most of winter that we ever knew
Was a gray, cloudy tincture of the air[.]

For those who did not live through it, the technology of the time will seem insanely primitive, as far from us as the turn of the 20th century was to them. The absence of the internet is only the tip of the iceberg. Kirsch remembers the limited graphics of one video game, which were

All that the bulky monochrome display
Could generate from five-inch floppy disks
You had to keep inserting and withdrawing,
Like turning hand cranks on an early Ford.

While Americans worried about nuclear war, Southern Californians prepared for other disasters. I myself remember the regular drills, but not whether they were for earthquakes, wildfires, or a meltdown at the local nuclear power plant. Kirsch describes a fire coming to his summer camp:

…red smoke drifted close enough to make
Our eyes burn like the chaparral around us,

and I don’t think I’ve heard the word “chaparral” since I moved away.

Brad Skow, Book Review: The Discarded Life by Adam Kirsch

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
First, the positive – I loved the second half of this book, where Clark tied in Plath’s life to what she was writing at the time. It gave some insight into her writing process and what inspired specific poems, and analyzed the artistry of her work. I also was impressed with Plath’s ambition and work ethic – I feel like a champion when I wake up at 4:45 to get a bit of writing done in my morning routine, but Plath wrote from 4 – 8am, as a single mother with very young children. She puts me to shame!

The negative…I did the audiobook for this – it was 45 hours long. I like Sylvia Plath as much as the next person – perhaps more – but I did not care about what she ate at girl scout camp or what grades she made in elementary school. I would have preferred a 300 page condensed version of this, focusing more on her career, development as a poet, and her poetics. I thought too Clark could have gone a bit more into the mental health aspect – I think she is kind of trying to make the reader think that Plath’s depression was hereditary and inevitable – but more could have been explored there.

But my main complaint is Clark’s kid-glove handling of the monstrous Ted Hughes. I think Hughes, whether indirectly or not, murdered Plath. Actual quotes from Ted Hughes:
“I murdered her.”
”It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius”
(at her funeral) “It was either her or me.”
(also at her funeral) “You all hated her too, right?”

Not to mention that he wrote Plath to tell her it would be better for him if she committed suicide. And don’t get me started on how he mishandled her work after her death – destroying her novel-in-progress and current journals, rearranging and editing her manuscript to take out the parts that made him look bad, letting his sister who hated Sylvia write her biography, letting his mistress handle her work…

Yet, Clark tries to subtly manipulate the reader of this biography to think of him as a Byronic hero – comparing him to Heathcliff and Rochester, commenting on his stormy good looks and country ways, his powerful poetic “talent” and how much he suffered after Plath’s death. Oh please! I like a biography that sticks a bit more closely to the facts of what this guy actually did, rather than trying to paint it in a gothic romance light.

Plath was no Innocent – the first half of the book slogged along as she dated so and so and cheated with blah blah blah and got drunk here and etc etc etc – she was not much of a prim 1950s lady. But choosing Hughes as a husband set her on an unstoppable slide to self-destruction. I don’t think he remotely deserves the wrist-slap of being called a “Rochester.”

I think there is room for another Plath biography to be written – one that is a little less soft on Hughes, a bit more focused on Sylvia’s career as a poet, and 1/3rd the length of this one.

Renee Emerson, A Mushroom of Doom, a Marriage of Doom, and a Face of Doom

“Impossible Paradise” is a selected poems taking from Chen Yuhong’s collections “Half-Light” (2022), “Trance” (2016), “In Between” (2011), “Bewitched” (2007), “A River Flows Deep in Your Veins” (2002), “In Truth the Ocean” (1999) in English translation. She has been influenced by poets such as Louise Glück, Anne Carson, Margaret Atwood, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy whom she has translated in Chinese. However, this is the first time Chen’s own poems have been translated into English. The selections are gathered by collection in reverse order, with the most recent poems first. She relishes in the everyday and natural experiences. […]

In “Inkstone” written, ‘on seeing a Duan inkstone from the Qian Long period, Qing dynasty’, the stone is “ineloquent”,

“yet from it soundlessly
flow mountain waters, birds,
insects, flowers, fish, people”

[…]

Chen’s poetry is quietly compelling and concerned with connections between people and between people and the natural world. It’s an empathetic, measured plea for compassion and understanding. The poem’s rhythms feel prayer-like, pointing to a space for mindfulness and focus. This collection and English translations are long overdue.

Emma Lee, “Impossible Paradise” Chen Yuhong translated by George O’Connell and Diana Shi (Carcanet) – book review

Normally at the top of these posts, you’ll see details of the publications under review: title, author/editor, etc. However, for If/Then, I list Chris Turnbull as ‘instigator’ and I do so for good reason. The genesis behind this most unusual publication was a visual poem by Turnbull which she sent to Linda Russo asking her to write something in response to it and then send her poem on to another writer to repeat the process. The result is a kind of chain art text, or 21st-century renga for longer poems. The final list of contributors is: Chris Turnbull, Linda Russo, Sandra Guerreiro, Anna Reckin, Camilla Nelson, Matti Spence, Sarah Cave, Luke Thompson, Suzanna V. Evans, Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Andre Bagoo, and Richard Georges.

Of course, the chain art experience is not that unusual, but what makes this one stand out is the physical structure of the object, which Turnbull describes as an ox-plough or boustrephedon, sheets of print bound in a complex folder card binding, not unlike accordion pleats, but reversible in multiple directions. Printed pages are bound into the folds using a loop of strong thread, one or two folded sheets per fold, and the first ‘return fold has a bonus of two square postcards with short extracts from a couple of the poems inset into slots in their backing card cover. The images at the link above are a perfect instance of a picture being worth a thousand words.

The poems set up conversations between them in a variety of ways. Some are straightforward links, as in the closing lines of Linda Russo’s ‘With Our Many Small Faces Turned To The Sun’:

burying the words, finally

o how long it takes

under onto

reconfigured to provide the opening for Sandra Guerreiro’s untitled response:

“o how long it takes

       under onto” entering the field

The next fold begins with Camilla Nelson’s ‘from Run’, a celebration of birds, her:

black bird                         black bird
ch-                      ch-                             ch-
meutgghhhh

looking back to Anna Reckin’s preceding ‘Now that’:

blackbirds shyer this year, but still there, darting
in and out of the ivy on the wall

Later in Nelson’s poem we read:

ch-                         ch-
click                     of cows                     moving
up                         chalk                         downs
and me in the dip
gathering sun

Then Matti Spence’s ‘Walk And’ opens:

Hear the chalk-
downs drone not white
but a proposal of something
near to that deflection

This is followed by Sarah Cave’s ‘Walk & Pray, Pilgrim’:

hear      the       chalk       rabbits
beneath       the          mountain
&    thru    the mountain    &    pray
&     ray     to     the     mountain

(Rabbits also appear in Spence’s poem.) The fold ends with Luke Thompson’s ‘Chalk Rabbit’.

The fifth fold then opens with Suzanna V. Evans’ ‘and sings’:

Sea-sieved melodies, whale melodies, fall like particles of chalk, marine
snow, down to the black spines of sea urchins, to the ear-shaped shells of
abalones.

There are other threads in these ecologically aware poems that I could have picked up on, but the chalk Downs of South East England have personal resonances for me, so I went with that one.

Billy Mills, Three Pamphlets and a Boustrephedon

Last week I was in London for a couple of days to do various things, but mostly to spend some time in the British Library. One of the items on my to-do list for the BL was to photograph in their entirety the two manuscript notebooks containing most of Payne Fisher’s earliest recorded poetry. I’ve known about these manuscripts for a decade or so, and I already had fairly detailed notes on them, but no full images and therefore no complete transcriptions.

Fisher, a fascinating figure about whom I hope to write a book in due course, went on to be Cromwell’s poet. I’ve written about him several times, both in scholarly articles and chapters and also here on substack:

Fisher came to the attention of Cromwell as a Latin poet, and it is as a Latin poet that he had great success in the 1650s (and diminishing success thereafter). His breakthrough hit was a remarkable Latin poem in the Claudianic style about the siege of York and the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. It is an excellent and unforgettable poem in large part because it is both genuinely a celebration of Cromwell’s unstoppable military might and a lament for the suffering of the defeated royalists and the besieged inhabitants of the city. (In this sense, though not really in many others, it is a bit like Lucan’s Civil War.)

Fisher had in fact fought at the battle of Marston Moor himself, on the losing royalist side, and the earliest versions of the poem — which exist in both Latin and English — are straightforwardly royalist. Here is a fragment of the early English version of the poem that would eventually become Marston Moor, describing the city of York:

That Matron-Citty prostituted now
To the leud embracement of hir Ravishers
Hung downe hir aged Head disfigur’d round
With Batteries both of Foes, and hir owne Feares.

When we think of ‘war poetry’ today we tend not to think of poetry celebrating the victors, but rather the verse that laments the suffering of the participants — as in the trench warfare of the First World War — or, as here, of innocent civilians. Conversely, if we think of the poetry associated with the English civil war, we think probably of the ‘cavalier’ poets, celebrating honour and chivalry mostly in a rather abstract if beautiful kind of way, as in Lovelace’s poem, ‘To Lucasta, on going to the wars’:

Tell me not (Sweet) I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee (Dear) so much,
Lov’d I not Honour more.

Fisher and Lovelace were almost exact contemporaries, and in fact Fisher met and became friends with Lovelace during the 1640s, when they were both serving in the army. But Fisher’s version of war poetry is entirely unlike Lovelace’s — and indeed it’s not much like anything else I can think of from this decade. The style is perhaps best described as ‘documentary’, and indeed several of the poems do seem to have their origins, at least, in material written during a campaign.

Victoria Moul, Realistic war poetry from the 1640s

[Margaret] Tait was Orcadian; though once she qualified as a doctor she travelled widely. In her mid-thirties, after serving through WWII in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she turned to filmmaking. “I think I gradually came over to feeling that it was necessary to do something more than just simply bringing people back to bodily health”. Between 1951 and 1998 she made over 30 films of various lengths, all of which have this sustained focus and attention to detail which I imagine she gave to her patients. Tait also published her own poems in three slight, beautiful hardbacks, the shape and size of a Ladybird book, in 1959 and 1960. Her logo is a cardiograph line, the double beat of the heart.

In her films and her poetry Tait was, says Ali Smith, instinctively Modernist (Smith links her to the Beats and Whitman, and to Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend and the subject of one of her films – check it out on YouTube). Interviewed on Channel 4, Tait quoted Lorca: “an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest … [The artist] enters what may well be called the universe of each thing … [he/she] takes all materials in the same scale”. The camera was an impartial witness, she believed: it showed all things in great and equal detail, it could present context and perspective as well as great intimacy. Using collage and disjunction, following associations of ideas and sounds and her own train of thought to move from one shot to the next, without hierarchy. This allowed her to create what she felt was “a pure form of poetry”. “In poetry something else happens … Presence, let’s say, soul or spirit, an empathy with whatever it is that’s dwelt upon, feeling for it – to the point of identification”. In The Big Sheep, for example, this dwelling is in accumulated, over-familiar layers. Images ‘rhyme’, and are nested together through repetition and cross-linking; she revisits and revises places, shapes, textures and faces constantly, in subtly interconnected moments. But these are not private exercises. She is constantly aware of us, the audience, peering over her shoulder. Look at this, she says. And this. Now look here.

“Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us,” said Charles Simic in ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’. “Language and paint are not metaphysical and forms are not spectral. Patterning is a universal human act”. It is in this that I understand her move from “simply bringing people back to bodily health” to looking more deeply at how we live, at how we knit our experience together. In her film poetry, she looks to present simply this, “in a way that only the motion picture camera has a language for”. Documentary filmmaking was, in her view, ultimately unsuccessful because of the way it isolates its subject from its surroundings in order to study it. “I think that film is essentially a poetic medium,” Tait said, “and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary”. Her film-poems have been described as anti-narrative. They end by simply ending.

Lesley Harrison, Sometimes it’s the Wordiness of Words That Gets in the Way

“Fardistantly past due, we throughganged the outpumpers, the alden gatherers saved from longforetimes.“

A couple of years ago, I made a video that used a very early version of MidJourney AI to create some background elements that I did not have my own material for. At the time, MidJourney seemed like an exciting new way to create original material. However, it is now clear that these AI engines illegally use original work and consume massive amounts of power. Therefore, I have completely remade the video using all my own footage. Even so, the images look somewhat unworldly, which is part of my intention. The text is in a kind of future-archaic dialect that I invented.

Ian Gibbins, The Bilgestruck reimagined

i find myself craving primordial. to chart
a path across species. wake up in the twilight dawn
of a thick-shelled egg. the sun, like a father’s eye
burning through the walls of any house.
we wake with hollow bones.

Robin Gow, 5/31

Whenever I watch sensei doing an arrangement, I am struck by her care, not only toward the flowers but her attention to the active empty space that is part of the floral field. When I took lessons in Dutch Still Life flower arrangement, I was surprised by the way the floral field is completely filled, in much the same way that an oil canvas is primed and fully painted. You never glimpse the canvas underneath an oil painting in the same way you see and appreciate the white spaces in a Chinese landscape painting.

Because, of course, the empty space is doing crucial work. In Japanese this is called 余白の美 the “beauty of the white space.” As an expression of “ma,” it is an emptiness that is active and generative. […]

I also often find myself now thinking about plants as sentient beings— each, as some Buddhist philosophers might say, on their own path toward salvation and enlightenment. Michael Pollan, in his new book on consciousness, begins his journey with a long meditation on exactly this possibility when he describes the poppies in his Berkeley garden appearing to return his gaze one afternoon, and rather than dismissing the experience, he followed his feeling into the emerging science of plant intelligence.

Researchers have shown that plants are able to read their environment and solve problems. They appear able to learn, form memories, send signals to other plants, change their behavior in response, and even cooperate with plants they recognize as kin. Pollan stops short of claiming they have reflective selfhood, but he takes their inner life seriously. And so do I.

Leanne Ogasawara, Mountain Tiger-Sky Mind 虚

you gave me your hand lens
by a mossy tree
and I looked up close
my eyelashes crushed by its metal rim
my nose touching tree bark
smelling its tiny life
made large.

On bark cliff faces,
dripping dark where the sun can’t enter,
unfathomable life hides
itself from view

Anna Chilvers, Confessions of a Moss Widow

It delights me that Scientific American includes science-related poetry — and when my monthly issue arrives I turn first to the monthly poem.  Here are the opening stanzas of  ‘The Algorithm’ by California poet Barbara Quick from the May, 2022  issue.

Optimization under uncertainty
is a field of study in which my grown son
will earn his Ph.D. The math, in his case,
concerns the production of wind energy.

He reads his papers aloud on the phone to me
as a way to optimize their clarity,
so that even a layperson, such as myself,
can understand what he’s saying,
in between each beautifully made
equation and graph.

Quick’s complete poem is available at this link.

JoAnne Growney, Science in Meter and Verse (from Sci. Amer.)

I’ve been thinking about the wind, its partnership with seeds, with pollen, its agency with water, how it casts it beyond its own reach, and sand, rising as clouds from the desert to whirl and settle to crevices in odd places, and weather, wind its worldwide vehicle. And wind’s havoc, flattened forests, but from which new growth births, and us, our dust bowls, how wind carries even our own species with it, tangling itself in our hair, lining our faces with its force. But it occurs to me also that we are as wind ourselves, the same force of movement, destruction, new plantings. We also drive ourselves mad with our constant blowing. What can we learn from being like the wind? Could we be more humble? But the very trees themselves bow down. But though we can “harness the wind” for our energy generators, we have not yet learned to stop it. There’s that. This week the wind blew light rain pattering against the window. And here’s a charming poem by German poet Jan Wagner that translator David Kaplinger has rendered “portrait of the rain.” I guess I’ll have to start studying German, so taken have I become with some of the German poetry I’ve been dipping into.

Marilyn McCabe, particles, pollen, all the dirt of the world

I’ve been thinking about throwaway remarks in poetry recently. Those little bits of speech which don’t really seem necessary but nevertheless lodge themselves into the felt memory of reading the poem with great force.

One such moment is the detail that Jaan Kaplinski supplies the reader in these lines, from his poem ‘This morning was cold’:

I came from a meeting – a discussion of
the teaching of classical languages –
and I was sitting by the river with a friend
who wanted to tell me his troubles.

The lines could make perfect sense without the reader learning about the ‘discussion of/ the teaching of classical languages’. There are many Jaan Kaplinski poems which include similar declarative statements without any self-interruption. ‘I came from a meeting/ and I was sitting by the river with a friend/ who wanted to tell me his troubles’ is fine. But it’s the bit in the middle I love, the bit you could argue that we don’t need. When I first encountered the poem some twenty years ago, I thought its inclusion was slightly knowing, a little on the nose, self-regarding, even. All this time later, I return to the poem to check that the poem’s speaker has remembered to include this unnecessary yet vital detail that so perfectly captures the urgent liminality of needing to switch between two very different worlds, from theoretical pedagogy to listening to the ‘troubles’ of a friend on a ‘freezing’ riverbank. The poem makes another, similar turn into the world of domesticity, towards its end: ‘I stopped at a shop for oatmeal and bread.’ This is also worth meditating on. But he had me at ‘meeting’.

Anthony Wilson, Lifesaving Lines: A discussion of the teaching of classical languages, by Jaan Kaplinski

I was editing some poems today and thought about one of the strategies that I use a lot when revising any writing. Cutting out the parts that are less interesting. Trimming filler. Pruning around important or more arresting images so that they stand out and aren’t cluttered up by other material. What would the musical equivalent of that be? I wondered.

I modifed the backing tracks from my piece Nothing Makes Poetry Happen (which I posted yesterday) and improvised an alto saxophone solo on top. I was trying to sound like Julius Hemphill on Dogon A.D. an album that I adore.

I took the poetry editing approach and cut out lots of filler. I noted that played too much, trying to capture the feeling of excitement and energy in the tracks. I didn’t leave much space. (Oh you ADHD!) So I edited out unnecessary parts. I found places where the “images” (musical ideas) would be better without the clutter around them. I didn’t reorder the solo, though sometimes I have done that. Except for adding on a single note at the end which came from the beginning in order to end with something more summative and cadential and a formal callback to the beginning.

With writing as with music, it’s easy to think that the flow of a draft is integral and inseparable to the essence of the work. But it isn’t. Or, in fact, one can craft a flow that better expresses or highlights the core material. And the modified flow often is a better manifestation or expression of the flow one was aiming for in the first place.

Gary Barwin, Editing music as if it were writing

Frances Brawne (later Frances Brawne Lindon) is cast as the girl next door in the Keats story. She literally became the girl next door when her family moved into rooms on one side of Wentworth Place (now Keats House) in Hampstead, London in April 1819. Fanny and Johnny had met the previous November in 1818 and Keats appears to have been initially quite critical and dismissive of her. She, however, showed him enormous kindness, gave him emotional support when his brother died of tuberculosis that December and it’s easy to reduce her simply to being the poet’s muse as the two became close during Keats’ most productive period in 1819. Fanny was “a voluminous reader” and “books were her favourite topic of conversation.” She was also, “an eager politician” and is described as being “fiery in discussion.” She was vey much Keats’ equal. On 18 October 1819, Keats proposed to Fanny Brawne and she accepted. Keats had given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry and a marriage would not be consented to by Fanny’s family. They kept their engagement a secret.

When Keats began coughing blood in February 1820 Fanny was still living next door. His infectious illness meant that meeting in person became problematic and instead they exchanged frequent notes and letters despite being only a few yards apart. Fanny would pass his window returning from her walks. All of this provided condition for an intense yet frustrating affair. We will never know if their relationship was consummated physically. The romance intensified when Keats left for Italy, on health grounds, in September. He never returned. He died in Rome in February 1821 with Fanny still believing he would be back by spring. She was thrown into a profound period of mourning that lasted six years when she learned of his death, cutting her hair short, wearing black and the ring Keats had given her before he left.

When she eventually married, twelve years after his death, she retained all of the poet’s letters and keepsakes and her archive provides much colour to the Keats story. It offers little further insight into her own. The letters she wrote to Keats are lost. The last ones she sent to Rome were never even opened and buried with the poet in accordance to his wishes. When the Keats letters were sold into a collection and published after Fanny’s death there was controversy. Fanny didn’t quite fit the Victorian narrative that had been established, she was too ordinary, even considered by critics as unworthy to be cast alongside such a distinguished figure as the poet. […]

Frances Brawne Lindon is number ninety two on the top one hundred list at Brompton Cemetery and I go in search of her. I find her in the brambles and the ivy behind a metal, workman’s fence. She retains a degree of separation, cut off, removed as she was with her poet. Perhaps they have some works in mind here. Perhaps they’ll clear a path to Fanny, give her a little more status, restore her to a greater and more deserving glory. She doesn’t need her lines cut back anymore. They’ve been lost already. I stand respectfully, eagerly behind the metal barrier as if I’m waiting for a rockstar or a member of the royal family, which, of course, I am.

Jan Noble, Nº66 Finding Fanny

In Prayer (I), George Herbert creates a sonnet out of a series of metaphors for prayer. No explanation is given. The images emerge, disorientingly.

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

I especially like the line The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, as I think it expresses a common feeling of reading poetry—a half-way feeling between experience and understanding. The soul can only be paraphrased. There are no words that fully express the human soul. The heart in prayer is on a journey to God, it cannot be said to have arrived. Poetry is the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage. It is a common cliché that life is a journey—but it is a cliché because it is true, it has been said for as long as there has been commentary on human life.

As Thoreau said, being a traveller is the history of every one of us.

A traveller! I love his title. A traveller is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from —— toward ——; it is the history of every one of us.

Poetry is about that traveling. Whether in literal journeys in which we learn to see strangely, as in Bishop, or about spiritual journeys, as in Herbert, travels in our heads and souls, poetry captures the sense of being unsure about the world, but knowing that something is understood. Before we can begin to talk about the specific understanding, we have to be able to enter the dream, and to begin to see the poem as it wishes to be seen. We must read like travelers, coming into a new place, looking for what they can see.

Henry Oliver, Something understood. How to read poetry.

This time, wedding travel took us to the high mountain country near Boone, NC–spectacular scenery, very rainy weather, fog rolling in, winding dirt/mud roads.

I am sitting in a tiny cabin in near dark, and I’m always surprised at how hard it is for me to work on the computer lit only by the light of the computer.  I’m fine reading online stuff with no other light, but writing a blog post feels hard.  Or maybe it’s the tiredness that makes it hard, the existing outside of my normal routines. 

Let me record a line that came to me this morning, which may find its way into a poem at some point:  “I am the bartender without a corkscrew.”

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Second Spring Wedding

When I began writing this, I saw the bats flitting about in the air but now it’s so dark that I can’t see them. When I look up from my word document (white words on dark “paper”), I see pale, parallel symbols across the sky.

It looks like a trace fossil.

Sarah Lada, Trace

This past weekend I was most fortunate to have been interviewed, via Zoom, by four Chilean university students of English and creative writing. They are taking Hernán Pereira’s course at Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile. In 2014, Hernán collaborated with Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania on a poetry and place project that resulted in the book So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapacá & Pennsylvania. Pamela Daza took the photos for the book; I posted a bit about it here. Thanks to social media, which I don’t often thank, I’ve kept in touch with Hernán, who is full of interesting ideas for teaching young people to enjoy poetry and to learn English.

Now, I’m retired, and I was pleased to hear from Hernán that he’s assigned his students books by English-speaking poets to read and research, and then interview, said writers (with whom he is acquainted). Would I be willing to be interviewed? Why, of course!

The result of most interviews is that I learn a great deal about my work by having other people ask me questions about it. I usually learn a bit about the interviewer(s) in the process. In this case, I was happy that the students had come up with some good and unexpected questions that really made me pause and ponder. I was also impressed with what excellent English skills they have, and how polite and earnest they are. One of the questions was what makes me motivated to write a poem. Not inspired (the usual question), but motivated–a slightly different verb and a telling one.

I answered along the lines of how seeing an image, experiencing an event, learning new information (ie observation), or reading a text with which I might disagree or wonder about leads me to a line of questioning/reflection, and that whole process motivates me to write. I have to say my answer was, in real time, rather vague, and that I was speaking with people for whom English is a second language. But a student named Maximillio said, “So, would you say then your motivation is responsive?” Wow, yes! Which clarifies a lot for me. I’m not a forward-momentum sort of writer who bulls into powerful expression, much as I admire such writers and sometimes wish I were more like them. I’m the ponderer, the one who imagines being an other and tries to figure out that perspective, the somewhat distant observer who nevertheless wants to bring the feelings and experiences home to whoever my reader may be.

That was a splendid experience for me. So nice to speak with people under 25 years old again. I miss that. Meanwhile, reading a 1998 edition of Lorca’s Poet in New York (in translation of course, though I am getting slightly better at reading the Spanish). And drafting new work in my head while watering the garden.

Ann E. Michael, Interviews

How to explain to someone else
when your basic condition is knowing you barely
have words for things in this universe? I try to strip
the shelves of my excesses. Why did I need more
than one pen, one bottle of ink?

Luisa A. Igloria, It was

People who believe in community lean into community. We are doing everything we can to lean in. I have been working seven days a week since becoming Publisher and CEO in January 2024. I haven’t been paid for three months. I’m going to keep working, but if it were up to me, I admit, I can’t carry this press into the future alone.

Sugar is poured unevenly in the publishing business. Presses without endowments and large operating reserves often go overlooked. I wonder where the sugar was poured for the Literary Arts Fund. I wonder if there was ever actually a chance for Red Hen Press, or if we only imagined there was.

Meanwhile, Tobi has powers and is hatching a plan, one that includes rebuilding our board. Our staff continues to march ahead. Our work goes on, but we need more support to be sustainable, to survive into the next year. Tobi is our community whisperer, the one who speaks in the clearing in the woods, and they help us believe that if the community wants Red Hen, it will happen.

The night we found out about the Literary Arts Fund, we had tickets to a play called Exotica, where performers dressed up like animals and performed aerial stunts. There were two dancing chickens (you really can’t make this up) who got all of us on our feet to conga through the adjoining restaurant. Maybe it was our new board member and Tobi, getting everyone up and dancing, to remind us that we are all in it together.

At some point, they had a “slut contest” to see who would dance on the bar and strip. The twenty-somethings lined up, but nobody took off more than a jacket. I just couldn’t let this pass. I got up and danced the slut walk, off came the jacket and the top. My bracelets and rings flew in all directions. Sometimes, you have to do it yourself.

Tobi is creating our future, and the future is a conga line with a chicken in the lead. I like that future. I believe in it.

We Kates don’t give up easily. I won the slut contest and walked off with the champagne. Red Hen Press will not go quietly into this good night. Tomorrow is another day.

Kate Gale, Not With a Bang: Finding Our Future in Community

My anguish can be washed in warm water, with a mild soap, when it’s soaked then rolled in an old towel lay it out in the dappled sun, beside lilies of the valley where it can hear the tinkling of its bells and exchange its sour breath for their small beads of sweet aroma smelling of fields and fields of the smallest hope.

Jill Pearlman, Anguish is like Laundry

Now here they come again, the immaculate men.
Here they come, smelling of incense and failure.
They walk past the pot-holes, weeds, broken glass,
into my dreams, while I sit in moonlight with my
book. What’s this pressed between the pages?

Bob Mee, THE JOY OF STREAM-WRITING IS NOT KNOWING WHAT’S HAPPENING, WHAT’S ABOUT TO HAPPEN

It’s summer, for sure this time. Gave my author site a cleanup for broken links and to be better organized. Read a bit. Sent a couple more submissions. Took a walk. Transcribed some.

Birdsong of various chirps, and another, somewhere among cat’s meow, falsetto donkey and door hinge. Took a horsefly, a wasp, a few deerfly out to see the sky. Snacked, drank, read some more. Received a few more submissions for my one-line chapbook call. Wrote some more.

Pearl Pirie, Getting Resettled

It took a while to make its way across the Atlantic, but I’ve quite enjoyed this first volume in a new pamphlet (chapbook) series from a new press that sprouted up on British Poetry Substack. Editor Victoria Moul’s taste and sense of what a general reader needs to know are both very good, so just as advertised, this serves as a fun and painless introduction to the sort of verse popular in Britain in the early modern period. I took it with me on a walk yesterday and found two poems in particular that struck me as beautiful and useful to my current frame of mind.

The first was this one by Robert Devereux

which was pure serendipity, because it’s where I opened the pamphlet immediately after setting aside the other book I’d brought with me into the woods, Peipei Qiu’s landmark study from 2005, Bashō and the Dao, where I’d just read her translation of one of the most famous poems from the Chinese recluse tradition, which set up a useful East-West comparison: 

The other poem that has burrowed in like a tick is this brief piece on the ephemerality of life:

The pamphlet is well designed and printed, not by some print-on-demand platform but by a printing press in East London. I’m not sure it makes financial sense to pick up an overseas subscription (five volumes for £58) but I like the subscription model a lot and will be rooting for Headless Poet’s success.

This week: becoming a living ghost, getting football fans to recite poetry, advocating for stupidity and vagueness, letting chaos turn to insight, and other adventures. Enjoy!

Here is the garden
where all our sins are remembered, where
all the embers are numbered, where the fires
join hands and sing across the Gorge: a canticle
for rain forests that were never meant to burn.

Dale Favier, A Compost Prayer

let’s wait for the accident to get cleared out let’s lie about our diagnoses let’s watch amerikka’s lunatic leaders preach like Aimee Semple McPherson back from the dead in a white shirt flapping her wings I dropped the script on the floor they gave me a loaded gun I slithered on my belly toward my car then stopped in the marram grass don’t forget your permission slips don’t forget the right side of my mouth all my teeth aching

Rebecca Loudon, Deconstructing the panic

In March, traveling in Ireland, our guide mentioned almost in passing that the Irish were proud to have had a poet lead them. She meant Seamus Heaney’s friend Michael D. Higgins, the poet and sociologist who served as President of Ireland from 2011 to 2025, and who was known to quote Neruda in speeches and has written movingly about the duty of the imagination in public life. Our guide said it with a kind of quiet satisfaction, as though this fact alone said something essential about Ireland’s values.

I have been thinking about that remark ever since, more urgently since Air Force One landed in Beijing.

Consider the contrast. In the United States, the executive branch has long been dominated by two professional tribes: lawyers and business executives. This was true when I delivered a paper at a remarkable conference on the spirit of cities in Shanghai many years ago — a transformative experience that left me with a question I have never quite been able to shake: why does one of the world’s most powerful democracies hand its government to lawyers and businessmen?

Leanne Ogasawara, How To Rule The World

In 2020 I wrote a considerable number of posts, both prose and poetry, for a series I called “Musings in a Time of Crisis.” Below, the twentieth post in the series, is one of the poems I wrote (I wrote another about George Floyd, who was murdered on Memorial Day that year). It seems more than fitting to post the poem again.

The poem references “the man in the White House”; the same one currently occupies “the People’s House.” That fact alone defies all reason, continues a crisis I could not have imagined would define the state of our country in the last third of my life.

Today, I also remember my father, who received an honors burial at Arlington Memorial Cemetery, where he has lain with two infant children since his death in the summer of 1990. Beside him now is my mother.

I honor my father today. He served in World War II in the famous all-volunteer group Merrill’s Marauders (a Time correspondent suggested the name), who were deemed “expendable” as they fought, commando-style, behind enemy lines in China, Burma, and India, who, lacking medicines, fought disease of all kinds, suffered a lack of food, and generally experienced all the horror that is war. It was a time my father did not talk about. My father would be appalled by the crisis his America faces today.

A tiny American flag marks every grave in Arlington on Memorial Day. May wherever it’s flown have meaning.

Maureen Doallas, Memorial Day

the museum felt like it was holding its breath.
clean. white. guards with ear pieces.
i wanted to see the declaration of independence
mostly because of the movie, national treasure.
i hoped it might have a golden map.
instead, the document stared back at me
from behind its glass. i asked in a whisper,
“is that it?” a piece of skin & a tissue box.
dull & worn. not like an elder fish’s gills but
like old stockings. like polyester thrift store bras.

Robin Gow, declaration

It is seductive, this selective time travel. The perfect weekend with the imperfect lover whose ineptitude at love you didn’t yet know would break your heart. The languid summer just before the diagnosis, the disaster, the death. The time you were ten pounds lighter and ten choices freer and ten mistakes less marred in the mirror of the mind. Over and over, the hand of memory reaches back, grasps for the bygone moment when life was simpler or brighter or more redolent with aliveness, forgetting that the only thing for the keeping is the naked now, vulnerable as a newborn, total as eternity. The great challenge, the great triumph, is to make of memory an instrument of presence.

That is what Diane Seuss offers in her splendid poem “Weeds,” found in her altogether vivifying collection Modern Poetry (public library).

Maria Popova, How Not to Dwell on the Past

I chose this poem because it represents that feeling of holding on a little too long to something you know you should let go of. At its essence, Dream Logic is a collection about heartbreak, but with a lower case ‘h’. The poems are quiet and long-suffering.

It is also about the way the mind can split off and begin rewriting the story, creating a kind of “what might have been”, blurring the lines between memory, nostalgia and dreamscape. I have always had an overactive imagination, and writing has been a healthy way to express that. I am often haunted by Miss Havisham in Dickens’ Great Expectations, waiting all those years and becoming a kind of living ghost.

Drop-in by Satya Bosman (Nigel Kent)

I wrote this poem in 2022 in Vamvakou, Greece, where I was introduced to the hawk moth (also called sphinx moth) after running from planter to planter thinking I was watching a rather drab hummingbird at work. Its caterpillar form is called a “hornworm.” None of these delightful facts fit comfortably into the poem, but I wanted you to know. I also—up until six months ago—had a grammatical error in the poem (dangling modifier) that no one had brought to my attention. Thank goodness for the copy editor that caught it.

Maya C. Popa, Four New Poems

Much-needed rain has arrived, and therefore I’ve been inside all day instead of out in the yard and gardens. I thought maybe I would feel motivated to send some of my poems out into the wider world. Turns out that the motivation was a decided maybe, leaning toward lethargy. Instead, I curled up with a cat and Jeff Burt’s collection The Root Endures (Sheila-na-Gig Editions).

Actually, I read this book a week ago but decided to take a closer look so I could post about it, because I like it a lot. Jeff Burt’s poems contain nature-images and close observations of creatures, plants, and weather yet keep reminding the reader that there’s a decidedly human component here, an interior character who speculates about what human beings are doing here, thinking about, recalling. And how the world is constantly in flux. The rural Wisconsin of the speaker’s childhood feels vividly authentic, and I learned about lime bogs and de-tasseling corn. (I love it when I learn things from poems.) The book seems autobiographical in narrative but never becomes as specifically personal as a memoir would.

And frankly, I guess I might identify more deeply with this book than other, perhaps younger or more urban readers would. I grew up in the mid-Atlantic suburbs, but I spent all my childhood summers in the Midwestern small towns where my parents’ extended families lived. I infer that Burt is pretty much my peer, age-wise; some of his remembered details conjure up a kind of resonance I enjoy. What I’d like to learn from this collection is how to sustain a longer poem, which he does quite well. Not a strength of mine, though I’ve attempted it once or twice with some success. A poem that has numerous short stanzas and travels several pages needs to keep my attention, whether I’m reading it or writing it. Burt’s title poem (the last poem in the book) does this, as does the poem “As If Copper Wire Sang the Unleashing of Time” and “Into the Standing Grain.” Maybe studying writers like Jeff Burt and others can teach me how to write better medium-long poems when a longer poem seems necessary to whatever I’m trying to express. I don’t think I’m interested in writing really long poems–think A. R. Ammons, C. K. Williams, Robert Lowell–but I’d like to explore length a little more.

Ann E. Michael, Rainy-day reading

Vasiliki Albedo & Lucy Holmes – Sardines (Dialect Press)

“but we hesitated at the prospect of jumping out of our tenuous

skins, of dampening the fervour to sample the oily salmon curve

of yet another Bandol Rosé.”

My goodness, I am a bit of a fangirl of these two. Singularly, of course, but together is also something different and quite special. Sardines is a gorgeous exploration of artistic friendship and collaboration. It’s brilliantly put together, with the email exchange between the two poets being just as fascinating as the poems themselves. Being let into these two minds at work, and at play, riffing off each other and their influences, felt like a real treat. It is, as they call it, both intimate and expansive, and it has made me look at collaboration in a new way, as well as introducing me to Frank O’Hara.

Victoria Spires, The thing is… books!

Sze writes measured, considered poems with a focus on the natural world and nature’s ability for re-growth after winter or human-made disasters. Humans here are ciphers, following orders or keeping to a narrow path without deviation. Nature follows different rules with respect for natural cycles, seasons and the ability to bloom after loss. There’s a quiet assurance here too. The tone is unjudgmental, even when observing that humans are the authors of their own misfortune.

Emma Lee, “Into the Hush” Arthur Sze (Penguin Books) – book review

I was very struck this week by an early poem by Tennyson which I don’t remember ever reading before, ‘The Palace of Art’. This poem is — rather brilliantly, I thought — the very final poem in the superb New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (OUP, 1994), edited by Jerome J. McGann. McGann’s anthology prints a very rich mixture of verse dating from between 1785 and 1832, in chronological order, under the year of publication. ‘The Palace of Art’ was first written and published in 1832, in Tennyson’s Poems — a collection that also included ‘The Lady of Shalott’, with which it has some obvious similarities. ‘The Lady of Shalott’ is much more famous, of course, and on the whole I think deservedly so, since its fable of solitude, the soul and the insufficiency of art (“I am half-sick of shadows”) is so much tighter, mysterious and self-sufficient.

All the same, ‘The Palace of Art’ is an extraordinary poem. Tennyson started out as a romantic poet, and this poem is his leave-taking of it: a sort of peak-romanticism that is also the end of it. McGann aptly describes it as his ‘hail and farewell’ to romanticism. It’s a little bit like Milton’s ravishingly lovely imitation of Virgil in the Epitaphium Damonis, a poem that similarly ends by bidding farewell to the style it has so perfectly inhabited.

Victoria Moul, I have found / A new land, but I die.

I take the 75 bus, the service from Withernsea, back to Hull. The automated announcer says, ‘Next stop: Hull Prison.’ Do not pass go. The delightful 1932 East Hull Fire station has a motto painted above each of its three arched vehicle doors: ‘Ready Aye Ready’.

I get off at the interchange, next to Hull Paragon Station, location of both the well-known statue of Larkin and the Royal Hotel featured in his Symbolist-ish poem ‘Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel’, completed in May 1966. In his biography of Larkin, James Booth claims that the atmosphere of the hotel is largely unchanged since the poem was penned, despite a major fire in 1990 and subsequent restoration.

It’s a sonnet, of course, with the turn coming after the ninth line. Although far from being the only poem in his oeuvre to prominently feature light, it starts with ‘Light’ and includes the word ‘lights’ twice, as though hammering the point that this hotel is, and maybe hotels per se are, very brightly lit: ‘In shoeless corridors, the lights burn.’ I love hotels, and I love poems, novels (e.g. Troubles by J.G. Farrell) and films (e.g. The Consequences of Love, Some Like It Hot and The Grand Budapest Hotel) which are at least partially set within them.

A curious part of ‘Friday Night’ is ‘all the salesmen have gone back to Leeds, / Leaving full ashtrays in the Conference Room.’ Few of Larkin’s mature poems mention smoking – is ‘Essential Beauty’ the only other? – even though he smoked throughout adulthood. In a dissection of ‘Cut Grass’, in which ‘Mown stalks exhale’, Tom Paulin conjured the perfect phrase, ‘the anxieties smokers know’; not all smokers are necessarily anxious (do Mick Jagger and Keith Richards ever get anxious?), but the overlap in a diagram by Mr Venn must be very considerable. All of this is a roundabout way of declaring my surprise that Larkin didn’t touch on smoking in his poetry more often.

The part of the poem which is undoubtedly the most intriguing is Larkin’s pressing-home of the point about the hotel being a bastion of ‘loneliness’ by adding the curiosity ‘How / Isolated, like a fort, it is’. Was he thinking of Fort Paull here? Or maybe Bull Sand, one of two Great War forts built in the Humber Estuary, visible from the end of Spurn Point, which is implicitly featured in ‘Here’ .

Matthew Paul, A bit of psychogeography

Mid-May is college commencement season here in the United States. It seems fitting, then, this week, to feature a poem about graduation. And our readers may remember George Moses Horton (1798–1883), whose “On Summer” appeared last July, as a poet whose own biography makes for the sort of triumph-over-adversity story so often embraced by commencement speakers.

Born into slavery, the sixth of ten children, on the plantation of a William Horton in North Carolina, George Moses Horton was an autodidact, teaching himself to read through hearing the Bible read aloud. He was the first African-American writer since the nation’s founding to publish a book of any kind (Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral had been published in London in 1773), the first writer to publish a literary work in North Carolina, and the only writer in American history to publish a book with an American press (J. Gales & Son, of Raleigh, North Carolina) while enslaved.

As a young man, sent from home to sell fruits and vegetables in nearby Chapel Hill, Horton began to make pocket money by composing love poems for students at the University of North Carolina. The students in turn supplied him with books for the furthering of his education. Today’s Poem, while not a love letter written for a college student, instead constitutes something like a love letter to the idea of The College Graduate and more: to the bittersweet appropriateness of leavetakings.

The verse itself, in abab quatrains of two tetrameter lines bracketed by trimeter, feels forced in places, with syntax inverted and the passive voice resorted to, to make the rhymes. Yet even where the poem strains to fulfill its form, there’s something compelling and charming in its voice. Adopting, at least in the first stanza, the persona of The Graduate, but inevitably conscious of the gap between that graduate’s future possibilities and his own, Horton writes of graduation as a kind of transcendence, as if the departing seniors were bodily assumed into heaven. One day, they’re at college; the next day they’ve simply vanished, “here to be seen no more.”

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: The Graduate Leaving College

Réka Nyitrai is a spell, a sparrow, a lioness’s tongue — a bird nest in a pool of dusk. A Romanian-Hungarian poet, she learned English (her primary language of writing) later in life, moving fluently between prose poems, haiku, and free verse, often channeling the feminist surrealist currents of Leonora Carrington, Aase Berg, and Aglaja Veteranyi. In 2020, she released a bilingual (Spanish and English) collection of haiku known as While Dreaming Your Dreams (Mano Ya Mano Books) which received a Touchstone Distinguished Books Award. She then released her debut full-length poetry collection, Moon Flogged, in 2024 through Broken Sleep Books, and recently released a chapbook through Ethel Zine called With a Swan’s Nest on Her Back. Her second full-length poetry collection Split / Game of Little Deaths will be out with Piżama Press in May 2026.

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

My first book, While Dreaming Your Dreams, is a collection of poems written in the haiku genre. A small independent publishing house in Spain published it in 2020, when I was already 43 years old. Even though my life did not change in a material sense, this debut proved I was resourceful and capable of turning abstract dreams into a tangible reality. Winning the Touchstone Book Award validated my work, but it also introduced an immense pressure: from that moment on, both publishers and readers expected nothing less than exceptional poetry. While writing a haiku seems deceptively simple, crafting a truly resonant one is a difficult feat. I realized quickly that I might not surpass the specific quality of the poems in my debut volume within that same form. Consequently, I put haiku on hold and transitioned toward short, lyrical prose, first in collaboration with my good friend Alan Peat, then independently. In essence, I have integrated a fragmented narrative arc into the surrealism and lyricism of my haiku roots. In comparing my recent work to my previous, I find that while the form has expanded, the core remains unchanged. No matter how much I experiment with structure, lyricism remains my second skin. Brevity and conciseness continue to define the sinews of my style.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Poetry is an intrinsic part of me. I wrote my first pieces —if I can even call them poems— while in grade school, writing in Hungarian, my mother tongue. At the time, I found them utterly silly, yet they must have possessed some merit as they were published in a children’s magazine. However, following a single rejection letter, I retreated from writing for a significant period. I briefly resumed during my university years, still in Hungarian, but abandoned it again, sensing my work lacked authenticity; I was merely attempting to mirror the voice of a well-known Hungarian poet. For a long while, I set poetry aside to focus on reading—interestingly, primarily novels rather than verse. Then, on a snowy day in 2018, a fully formed haiku suddenly emerged in my mind, composed in English, my third language. That moment solved my dual dilemma: it defined both the genre I was meant to inhabit and the language in which I would finally find my voice.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Réka Nyitrai

I went to find poetry, or those who might inhabit poetry, at a football match. It was a Friday night in Hull. And Friday night in Hull is the last place you’d expect to find poetry which is precisely why I thought I might find it there. There was of course a poem, Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel by Hull’s adopted laureate Philip Larkin. Larkin went out of his way to disengage from what you might describe as a poetic life, living instead as a curmudgeonly librarian in a rather remote corner of England, writing of absence and detachment with exquisite precision.

My idea was to get football fans to recite his poem. The Royal Hotel in Hull is now a temporary home for those seeking asylum and has been the focus of protest from both sides, the send-em-backers and the let-them-stayers. I’ll let you use your own prejudice to decide which group you think football fans are more likely to fall into. I felt the poem, written in the 1960s about a hotel in decline from its victorian splendour, carried new potency, might add some nuance, allow people to think differently, consider this delicate situation poetically. Lines like “writing home / if home existed” and “letters of exile” took on a different significance.

I had imagined skinheads with bitten off ears weeping and switch bladed hooligans grimacing, all delivering lines of poetry with passion or menace or unexpected sensitivity. It didn’t quite happen that way. I recorded a lot of footage and the fans were generous but most of them regressed, became nervous nine year olds at school being told by teacher to read out in class. They’d all much rather be at the football than making fools of themselves with poetry.

WATCH FULL FILM

I knew there was something in this project, a film of a poem being read by those who inhabit a different kind of poetry. I asked an actor friend and Chelsea fan Mike Grady to help it along, to offer a more considered reading himself. Mike’s done a tonne of Shakespeare, movies, TV and audio books across the decades and has that voice, you know that voice, the voice you’d listen to even he was reading an itemised bill.

Mike is calm and gentle and delivers the poem beautifully. Although he’s spent his career on stage and in film I believe he’d prefer his life to be as drama free as possible, that a poetic life is not one that he has any desire to aspire to. I’m beginning to think that most people probably feel this way. On my poetry walks I find I’m drawn to the poets who lived gregariously, lives punctuated with spilled drinks and broken hearts, knife fights and mad houses. Perhaps I need to redraw my map.

Jan Noble, Nº65 Friday Night at the Royal Station Hotel

This poem was a sort of whim I had, which I wrote down, then laid aside. I often saw the title when inside explorer, but didn’t open the file again, then called, “I Asked AI,” until this afternoon. When I read it again, I thought there was something there, and as I edited and rewrote, I ended up somewhere entirely different from what I would have guessed the poem would be. Which is what poetry is really, right? The journey you take while you move through it.

And I must say that my own ambivalence about the current conversations about AI certainly came out in this poem. I could write a long, long discussion about AI and I may one day, but for now let it suffice that I am a diehard Trekkie before all other things.

Here it is, thoroughly redone, with a new title. Let me know what you think.

Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

I asked AI
the price of milk.

She gave me a baby.

I asked AI
for breakfast.

She gave me
a potted plant.

I asked AI the time.
She gave me
a ball of string.
[…]

Rebecca Cook, Space is a Perpetual Motion Machine

Adjacent to my current writing/ researching around memory, I’ve been thinking about the difference between intimacy and immediacy as both affective experiences and as literary/ artistic techniques. In the realm of experience the gulf between these two states feels immeasurably wide: the former is a slow foliation over time; it is predicated upon mutual vulnerability and care. One grows into the intimate. Immediacy, on the other hand, is a synapse-sparking collision in-the-moment. It’s the risk of exposure, the giddy high of arousal. Immediacy is instant and kinetic. Intimacy is profound. Both are vital components of what we might rather pompously call “the human condition”, but either on its own produces an emotionally and experientially lopsided life.

Within art and literature, things look a little different: inside of review-space, I see intimacy and immediacy used as virtual synonyms a lot (cards on table, I suspect I am as guilty of this as anyone), while stylistically, the former often feels sacrificed on the altar of the latter. In poetry – the one area I’m actually qualified to talk about – this appears as, but it not limited to: direct address, and a posture of unfiltered disclosure; a plausible musicality of language, often valorised under the rubric of “accessibility”, that presents little difficulty by way of intellectual assimilation and understanding. Immediate poems make a broad appeal to the emotions through the urgency of their themes and what I guess we might call the melodic “flow” of their delivery; they excel, I’d say, at their best, in evocative moments of lyric phrase-making. They tend to centre a stable-speaking lyric subject, and are often concerned with notions of embodiment and authenticity. Intimate poems, on the other hand, are slow-growers: they slightly resist readerly efforts to enter and understand; they might take a little time to parse, to locate who is speaking, where, and to what purpose. Which is not to say that all intimate poems are “difficult” or “obscure” – Michael Donaghy’s poems are intimate, but they also operate within tightly turned and self-contained conceits – I mean only to suggest that we cannot make the same kinds of ready assumption about authentic and unfiltered writer-to-reader disclosure within an intimate poem; there’s masking, play, a teasing-out required to identify a speaking voice and its relationship to ourselves. These poems are not necessarily in or of the moment; they posit other places that we have to work to access. I think the best intimate poems are those less concerned with the “flow” or “beauty” of their lyric phrasing, than they are with judiciously weighing each word and its placement within a line; this often produces slightly strange syntax, and a feeling that pressure is being applied to language in some way; that language is being thought about as substance and structure, not only as a delivery system.

To be clear, this list of tendencies is not exhaustive, neither are these two toolboxes mutually exclusive: there are plenty of amazing poets living and dead who deploy both sets of technique within their individual poems and across the broad corpus of their work. I’m not picking a side here either. I read both. I write/ have written / written with both. I like both. Ascribing a moral or political value to a set of stylistic and structural techniques is limited binary thinking that serves absolutely no one and is impoverishing to poetry as an art. What I will say is that we are at a place, in Space Year 2026, when the immediate is in the ascendency, that is, as a dominant style on page and on screen, and as the signal nature of our experience under late-stage blah de blah.

Here I do have a problem: because immediacy is a condition of capitalism. It is manufactured by capitalism, and it serves the aims and interests of capitalism. What is immediacy, after all, but a denial or a loss of mediation? A desire for the frictionless assimilation of ideas and experiences without the necessity to collide with opposing and obstructing otherness. I follow Hegel and Kornbluh here: the world – of things and ideas – only becomes what it is through its relationships with and to (the) other/s.
Knowledge and understanding require a process of moving through and bearing with difference and contradiction – it’s dialectical, duh.

And this is self-evidently true, isn’t it? No one is legitimately going to argue that abdicating thought and choice to an algorithm has enriched our lives or experiences of art, or that the ceaselessly scrolling echo-chambers of social media have benefited anyone but ket-cooked billionaire tech bros, are they? Okay, fabulous. On some level, then, we do acknowledge that social conditions replicate themselves in consciousness, profoundly shaping the ways in which we relate to the world and ourselves. Immediacy as a poetic/ writerly technique can be a useful tool; when used consciously it can also perform a critical reflection of neo-liberal conditions. A problem appears only when this particular technique is granted an undue supremacy (which, to be clear, it has been), owing largely to the dictates of a publishing marketplace driven by demand for zeitgeisty and easily-assimilable dreck – by capitalism’s endless cool hunt, and its race-to-the-bottom populism. So far, so icky, but so much worse than a prevailing style is when immediacy becomes a manner of reading, the dominant manner of reading, the way in which editors and publishing professionals are now trained to read – this, for the practice of art and literature – is absolutely fucking disastrous.

Fran Lock, “GRANTAGATE”

I’ve become lately very wary of ways of reading poems that assume an overall meaning, or that the poem has established images in it. I need language and articulation to play a role, almost from a dugout. This stanza really answered that need this morning.

A syllogism relies on simplified language, reduced vocabulary, simplified acts. Then it can assert a truth claim and test it logically. But this stanza isn’t doing that. I can spot bathos in Pope’s Rape of the Lock, for example, because the images, argumentation and narrative are clear, so it’s more like a farce, with twists (the clown unexpectedly doesn’t fall, the vicar does). In Pope, the play of etymology is clear and the diction under control so much that it’s like maths (vide D Davie). In this late Hill stanza, Hill is recognising that he has collected vocabulary in order to make Hill Poems in perpetuity. But he catches himself doing it, and throughout the sequence advocates for stupidity and vagueness. Hence the metal detector line. Showing what rings true, and also too automated. And then there is a sad sense of age throughout the sequence and in this stanza, hence that kind of career-bathos. The theme throughout the sequence is “life is a dream”, and so there are hallucinations and sour wakings and also glad wakings, both still alive and ailing.

Ira Lightman, Brief note on late Hill

I blame these threads on Roland Barthes, and his “rustle”, that sound of fabrics swishing against each other within a sentence or phrase, the position that welcomes friction, as he puts it in The Rustle of Language (italics mine):

“I am putting myself in the position of someone who does something, and not of someone who talks about something: I am not studying a product, I am taking on a production; I am abolishing the discourse on discourse; the world no longer comes to me in the form of an object, but in that of writing, that is, of a practice; I’m going on to another type of knowledge (that of the Enthusiast)” . . .

Elsewhere, Barthes mixes his musings, always imagining that projected work (ultimately, the Proustian novel that never happened). Under the title of “Book projects”:

Incidents (mini-texts, wrinkles, haikus, notations, playing with meaning, everything that falls, like a leaf).

What does that mean?

A non-book could be conceived: one which would relate a thousand incidents, by keeping itself from ever drawing one line of meaning . . . 

Incidents kept throwing palimpsests before me, to double the trouble of my overly-entangled interpretations.

Alina Stefanescu, The two-faced self-portrait.

It was only a few years ago that I first read Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband. She writes at the end, 

“Well life has some risks. Love is one. Terrible risks.
…
On a June Evening
Here’s my advice,
hold.

Hold beauty.”

When I was in undergrad, back in Miranda House, I hated men so much that my friends gave me the nickname of spinster. Before Carson, it had never occurred to me to think of men as beautiful. These past few weeks, my Instagram algorithm has been showing me reels of a woman handing out compliments to men and I thought I have been called beautiful so many times in my life but I have never called a man beautiful even though I have seen the beautiful Flemish painting like hands of men making espresso behind coffee bars in Rome, or the statuesque pose of waiters in Parisian cafes, or Michelangelo’s David, their noses and day old beards, Caillebotte’s paintings of men rowing boats or working a wooden floor, their strong forearms seducing women. Their faltering voices over phone calls, their shy disarming smiles, their bicycles, and new sneakers, their excuses to have conversations or to hold a woman’s hand, their new crisp cotton shirts, or summer haircuts, jackets, and watches, their heads turning in corridors, or attempts at making witty charming comments. Their eyes full of weight and sadness, having seen life pass them by, the undereye bags after a night of insomnia, or throats almost choked with tears. Their fear, cowardice, and exhaustion. Their helplessness and repressed anger. They, too, were children once. Their restless fingers and nails and mouths that sometimes say things I barely hear. If one looked at them long enough, they seem almost as beautiful as Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. 

Saudamini Deo, On seeing men

I imagine the shape of air, the way the air moves with the wingbeats of birds. How the air vibrates when it is moved by birdsong. I imagine how the air might remember those movements it was once made of, that it was once the medium for. Lost birds. Birds that once were. Their flight, their song. The geometry of a place: its birds, trees, voices, rocks, water, air. I imagine as scaffolding for time and space as time as space are scaffolding for those things. The air is and stands in for possibility. What was possible in the past, what is possible now, what might be possible in the future. What we still have and what we have lost. How might I consider it as an instrument to play, an archive to explore, and medium to live in. I frequently consider Walter Benjamin’s angel of history and the wind of history that blows it away from history. But I think also of the entire space it is in. The wind that blows the angel back into the future is somewhere. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but in a somewhere. I think of this somewhere as having multiple dimensions: time and space, certainly, but also memory, and possibility. This is the place where I find myself. Like the self, it is both a medium, a concert hall and a harp to play.

Gary Barwin, Ghost Birds: memory and the shape of life

Shield of Mnemosyne is not my first extended, large-scale poema (Russian term for such things). I’ve written around 10 of them over the last 40 years. What is the primary, underlying literary impulse here (aside from all the other forms and phenomena of motivation)?

I am traveling a path opened by Hart Crane. His path, in turn, was opened by Walt Whitman. Hart followed Walt down that Open Road into America… and built a Bridge for it. I am trying to build a poetic House (or Temple, or Church) – a way station along, or at the never-ending end of, that cosmic trail.

There was another modernist “epic” poet, who like Crane formally announced his Whitman affiliation : Ezra Pound. And a few of my few though very fit readers have noted Poundian echoes in my efforts. But it is the gift of Hart Crane, not Pound, which has offered me the closest aesthetic model and deepest poetic inspiration. My long poems are buildings. Humble shacks, homes, temples… made with song.

I have been an outlier in American literature for so long, it’s become second nature. But I think our literary and intellectual culture simply does not know how to pigeonhole, bracket and brand me to suit its (generally commercial/ephemeral) purposes. I’m not so easy to read : you have to climb into the rafters. You have to put two-&-two together. But my idiom is music – which itself comes to me from a deep well of air, a basic joy of breathing. I mean this in very a literal sense : because when I was four years old, back in 1956, I contracted GBS (Guillain-Barre Syndrome), a rare disease similar to polio. I was paralyzed up to my neck, and kept alive by a breathing apparatus called an “iron lung”. So I’ve had a special appreciation for the breezy river of air that is poetry ever since.

As it happens, I composed my first known poem later that year, in 1956 : a brief ditty about work vs. play, addressed to my father. He scribbled it down on a little cardboard key card, on his way out the door to work. My mother saved that little card; she put it in the mail to me, sometime around 2006.

Henry Gould, Behind the SHIELD OF MNEMOSYNE

I have a broader idea around what a ‘successful’ writing life might constitute for a poet. To have five or six poems that last a hundred years already includes you in the highest rung. Three or four, is sustained brilliance, and far beyond your generation. One or two, is the goal for the most of us – to have made the hours, the life’s commitment, somewhat worthwhile. Auden is very clearly of that second group. But I cannot help but now see an infecting slackness to the majority of his verse.

Before collaborating with Stravinsky, Auden also worked with Benjamin Britten on the operetta Paul Bunyan (1941). What rigour did he bring to the project? First, let me show the rigour he demands of others. Here is Auden writing on Hamlet:

Hamlet has many faults – it is full of holes both in action and motivation. The sketchy portrayal of Fortinbras is one. We hear early about his plans, when Claudius sends word for him to stop. Fortinbras agrees, but wants permission to pass through Denmark on his way to Poland. We see him pass across the stage on the way to Poland, and he returns when everyone is dead. This subplot is needed, but it is not properly incorporated into the play. The action involving Laertes also poses problems. When Laertes returns from France the second time, why hasn’t someone told him Hamlet killed his father, and when he storms the palace, why is all the excitement over in a few moments? Polonius is secretly buried. Why? Polonius’ death is necessary to get Laertes back to England, but again the subplot is not really knit into the action. And why does Claudius delay in killing Hamlet and make elaborate plans which could miscarry? Ophelia is a silly, repressed girl and is obscene and embarrassing when she loses her mind over her father’s death. But though her madness is very shocking and horrible, it is not well motivated. She was not so wild about her meddling Papa, nor was she tremendously interested in Papa.

We have arguments about the deftness of sub-plot integrations, plot inaccuracies, and, of special note, issues with character motivation. In fact, Auden’s series of Shakespeare lectures display numerous instances of sensitivity towards character actions and motivations – those of Iago and Othello a particular standout.

How does this compare then to his self-critique of his own opera, Paul Bunyan:

Babe, the blue ox who gives him [Paul Bunyan] advice, remains a puzzle; I conceive of her quite arbitrarily, as a symbol of his anima, but, so far as I know, one explanation is as valid as another. Nor have I the slightest idea why he should fail to get on with his wife, unless it signify that those who, like lumbermen, are often away from home, rarely develop the domestic virtues.

Here, we have the librettist confessing an ambivalence as to both why the characters exist and, also, why they act in the manner that they do. How do we begin to square the discrepancy between the two stances? On days that I am feeling unkind, today is one such day, I think that Auden felt the latter statement was allowably, flippantly brilliant because, well, it came from Auden.

On more objective days, my relationship with Auden is similar to my thoughts on Hugh MacDiarmid. Admiration tinged with a weary dissatisfaction. Yes, yes, there are those wonderful few pieces, but look at the lazy slagheap of dashed-off dross… Countered by: yes, yes, look at the lazy slagheap of dashed-off dross, but there are those wonderful few pieces.

I wonder what the community thinks. Does all the poor work even count when we consider a poet and their legacy? Or does this not matter, and do only the brief heights that a poet reaches count?

Niall Campbell, Being Frustrated With One of the Greats

Spring cleaning seems like an obvious metaphor for revision and assembling a poetry ms. It’s not unlike casting a hard look at the poems you’ve accumulated and clearing out the debris that clogs their pipes, whatever elements might interrupt their force for a reader: cliché, unproductive digression, wordy moments.

I’ve done some beyond-the-ordinary cleaning this year, too, as a person on sabbatical tends to–and maybe a person winding up the whirlwind of a book launch, too. First ritual is clearing junk out of the office, which is both helpful (what have I lost track of?) and restless procrastination (I think of a dog or cat circling around before settling into a comfortable position). I also clean, literally and metaphorically, between hard writing pushes. For a few weeks I keep my head down and focus; then I get tired and fuzzy, unable to see the project, so I do a variety of chores. This includes professional stuff like reference letters; personal stuff like getting a haircut; and home tasks such as tackling a closet that suddenly looks dysfunctional. Visiting my kids as they struggled also meant tackling cleaning tasks that overwhelmed them–hard work but genuinely helpful, unlike some other parental behaviors in face of crisis. While I sorted and scrubbed, I thought a lot about cleaning my mother’s home during her final illness five years ago. Sort the pills into a dispenser, throw out expired foods and buy new, and shine up the sink because you can’t shine up the future or make medicine actually cure a person–that sort of desperate labor standing in for all that I could not do.

While polishing poems is a good and necessary step, though, I’ll make a case for dirtying them up first. At least for me, first drafts usually hide something important. It’s hard to dig into the real mess of my thinking and feeling. That stuff is ugly, burdened with shame, jealousy, misdirected anger, lazy illogic, and other emotional and intellectual habits that make me look bad. But poems become more valuable to others when I’m willing to do the work.

Lesley Wheeler, Getting dirty for poetry

Then I was right in there
amongst bouncy pond weed, 
straggly ribbons of leaves
and those shades of brown and black in close-up.
Oh, the depths of it.
I was so cold amongst the stale green smell
but happy.

They shouldn’t have ripped me from it
just to wrap me in a stranger’s dog blanket.

Sue Finch, FINDING THE SHAPE OF THE GARDEN

Poetry in part is a way to impose order, or find and highlight order or patterns. It is skill of finding significance and meaning, but if you try too hard, are too attached, remember that meaning isn’t hard to confer randomly. Try “he’s such a ___” and add a random noun. {cucumber, cummerbund, paper cut}. Meaning isn’t hard. It’s near unavoidable with our meaning-addled brains.

The danger in poetry is to hard-close, to soothe too soon, to give a satisfying shape before the work. It is to speak like a bland or witty horoscope containing no actual thought, but flattering appearance of it, thereby manufacturing a patronizing poet voice of authority.

A risk is to make the work the packaging words and poetic devices, the hook and the resolution, instead of the deeper work of changing self, disturbing system defaults, growth, depth, letting chaos turn to genuine insight into systems or witness the discomfiting. 

As hard as it can be to be published, with 1% to 3% acceptance rates, the hard part of writing, the most active time is the making, the improving, the shaking up your own practice, the expanding or leaning into the weirdness of your brain. The sporadic hurry-scurry of pitching poems is work but is not The Work.

Pearl Pirie, The Work

I am not being dishonest when I say I don’t like waking up at 6am.  It makes me negative. I hear stories of high-achieving friends waking at sunbreak to write, to lift weights at the gym …different species.  It’s only the leaking of the sun through the blinds that stirs me – I take in the morning’s emanation, all objects like clay just thrown and still wet in that bluish light, waiting to be fired.  My nerves, like theirs, also quiver… 

If I have no obligations, I will drift asleep at 7 into a savage world of my own interior, my dreamer standing at the glass, eavesdropping and observing myself with such precision I am often aghast.  I have dreams that enact social satire about our tourist class – ‘What actually IS a Rhode Island?” – to appalling tests of motherhood – I’m really eating live flesh?  – to surprises of who’s in bed with whom in what country – the full screen of entanglements.  Then there’s the Russian doll metaphor.  Walking into a Banana Republic while living in a Banana Republic — oh images on the screen, how crisp and precise!  Get out your pith helmet, your jeeps, your fake smiles….

Jill Pearlman, Savage Truths of 7am

I’m planning for a writer’s residency and thinking about what makes for a successful residency – crunchy snacks? comfortable pants and shoes? Inspiring reading material? A set of goals? I want to work on my book that I’m still sending out and write some new work – either essays or flash or poems. I haven’t felt very creative the last few months for some reason.

So I’m hoping this time away will give me some new perspectives, some time away from social media, television, and the routine.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Green Herons and Goslings, AI Lit Mag Scandals, Planning for Writing Residencies

It’s been a long time since I did a guest slot reading – my own fault, I withdrew following a now-long-ago (first) heart attack – but I’m really pleased to say I’ve been pencilled in for the excellent Buzzwords in Cheltenham on Sunday, February 14, 2027.

Yes, it’s a long way off but that shows just how popular the Buzzwords set-up is – held upstairs at the Exmouth Arms in Bath Road on the second Sunday of the month except, if memory serves me well, for August.

I’m already looking forward to it. I read there years ago and tried to contribute to the open mic session when I could, but as I said, fell out of the habit.

Now, with the publication of Poems In The Key Of Aardvark (see image of cover below), I have a responsibility to get off my behind and do readings again and anything else I can to promote it.

I’ll get out to do some open mics where I can. It’s sad that Stratford Literary Festival no longer caters for poetry – ancient or modern – but I’ll see where the new determination to socialise leads. It’s brought back fond memories of reading at a variety of festivals, poetry groups etc over many years, so this, I suppose, is something of a comeback.

Bob Mee, OF POETRY READINGS AND MINDLESS FOLK WHO STEAL CHICKENS

It feels like the first week of summer, although it’s hard for me to pin down when summer starts precisely.  The last day of in-person class feels like a demarcation line, as does turning in grades, as does graduation.  I want to spend some time this week planning for ways to get back to creative writing, the non-seminary, non-sermon writing.  I want more poetry.  I also want to remember that this summer is the time I planned to put a new poetry collection together.

Here’s what I wrote in a December blog post:  ” I’m going to wait until summer to do a deeper dive into manuscript assembly. I’m going to create a new manuscript called Higher Ground. The title works on several levels with the climate change poems along with spirituality poems.”  That blog post reminded me that I had looked at past manuscripts–do I want to use one of them as a skeleton/scaffolding or start by looking at files of individual poems?

I also want to return to my New Year’s resolution, which was also my 2025 resolution:   “I am not feeling OK about how many poems I am not writing. I do a good job of writing down fragments and inspirations, but I’m also aware that I have fewer inspirations and fragments in the past year or two than has been usual. I want to end the year with 52 poems written, finished poems. They may not be worth sending out, but they need to be finished. Fifty-two poems gives me space to catch up, and space to have a white hot streak that sets me ahead.”

Here’s hoping for some white hot writing streaks this summer!

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Summer Writing Intentions

The cusp of summer always means summer projects, which, despite my not being beholden to academic calendars any longer, still seems like a nice time to try to get some things done, although not with as much fervor and doggedness as that which comes with autumn. This summer, after I finish a couple of play scripts that are in various stages, next up will be my next installment in the Antiquities series. I have only been in research mode of late and made a few collages a couple years back, but I am determined to get at least a good first draft by September on a series of Calypso-inspired poems. Considering one of the first unpublished poems I wrote in my very first year of writing seriously in the late 90s, a poem called “Plentitude” that is probably way too bad to share now, it seems fitting this is where I go next. […]

My other goal for the summer is to start dipping my toe into submitting plays to theaters and contests once I’ve built up something of a body of work to actually show off. Things have been going well, and just this weekend, I was able to put a bow on the final version of my Macbeth witches retelling, as well as get the first act roughly rendered of something else that mixes 90s culture, teen dieting, and demonology that’s turning out to be a lot of fun.

Kristy Bowen, May Paper Boat

I have to say that the research I’m doing on the novel I’m writing about libraries and card catalogues and the future, is so much fun and taking me to the coolest places. In the old days, I’d probably share some of that here, but it’s the new upside down secretive world of writing that we now inhabit I suppose and it seems folly to speak about one’s projects. But one essay that pops out is by Umberto Eco, on censorship. He wrote it in 2009 and it feels like he knew what our times would be like, because it was a lesser version of the noise filled world then. This is when the world began filling with digital noise, “an excess of information.” He says, “This great need for noise is like a drug: it is a way to avoid focusing on what is really important….” He refers to Saint Augustine and “Redi in interiorem hominem,” return to the interior (hu)man.

The thing I find most interesting is that he also says that even when people are oppressed by “the most censorious tyrants” they have been “able to find out all that is going on in the world through popular word of mouth.” And this is why he says that the biggest “ethical problems we face today is how to return to silence.” He calls for a study of semiotics of reticence, a semiotics of silence in political debate, in theater, and in other forms of communication. He asks us to consider the long pause, “silence as creation of suspense, silence as threat, silence as agreement, silence as denial, silence in music.” […]

We are in an imagination battle, as adrienne marie brown has said in her book on emergence. We need to invent new ways to see, to write, to be. Or maybe it’s a reclaiming of the old ways. I’ve been embracing my film camera, I always write with a fountain pen. I’m going to be on social media a bit less, I swear lol, or at least be there more on my own terms. I’m planning a reset time, turning it off for a week or so here and there. Maybe even a month at some point in the near future.

O’Donohue talks about the imagination. It is like a lantern, “it illuminates the inner landscapes of our life and helps us discover their secret archaeologies.” How to see the mystery and beauty ever-present?

We can cultivate the “grace of innocence” and tap into our “passion for freedom.” Our hearts are wild, naturally. We can still answer the call to a creative life for we know instinctively what that is. The imaginative life is one of mystery, ecstasy, joy, possibility, delight, revelation, and with some perseverance, perhaps transcendence.

Times are always changing; let us use this time, we creative souls, spirits, to reinvent what creativity is even. Let’s find new ways to share our work, new ways to create, perhaps more secretly or word of mouth. Let’s share with those who approach with reverence. The others never wanted our offerings anyway.

Shawna Lemay, Let’s Talk About Word of Mouth, the Unforeseen, and Delicious Trouble

When I have created art that denies my authentic self—whether by erasing my shadow self, over-extending anchors, over-clarifying my interiority, self-questioning my patterns and symbols, or cleaning up language so that it doesn’t feel “too obscure” for the reader—I have felt a primordial sting of shame.

But when I’ve generously translated the creative currents within me without diluting them, I felt an existential, euphoric liberation.

What I have learned is that the writing doesn’t need to come with a map or key. Trust that the human heart will know its way. Indulge the mystery. Bend time. Let blue be green be garnet be gold. Resist the need to hold everyone’s hands, & to have your hands held. Let the underbelly speak. Get lost in the process. Push past the illusory. Relish in the lostness. Quiet the noise. Descend and translate. Look for the big fish in the deepest of waters.

You also never need to explain or justify your process. It’s not really about you or me. It’s bigger and deeper than us all. We are a splendid conduit when we get out of the way.

Lisa Marie Basile, The poetic permissions of dream logic & otherworlds

I keep trying to break
language into patterns that will mean something

beyond myself. I think of the mulberries I picked
from a friend’s garden, how even as half of them

sank into swift ferment, their skin still gleamed.
Night, too, presses its blue bruise against

the house walls. Everything can fold back into itself,
and my ghosts slip back like leaves into the pages of

a book. After, the air feels like it does after someone
has said something so real, it becomes unrepeatable

Luisa A. Igloria, Veined

Because we’ve lived in our house for forty years, my garden has suffered many changes of mind. And because roots can be very persistent, sometimes my older ideas re-emerge. This poem is the story of one of those reappearances, told in the classical meter known as the Sapphic stanza, one of my favorite ancient rhythms. […]

Stand there still, O vegetable love. Grow taller.
Soar and soften out to a ferny greenness
feathered open, branched to adorn these hoped-for
armfuls of roses.

Maryann Corbett, Asparagus

It’s the toadflax that gets me; those clusters of tiny violet flowers, pushing through gravel and tar. It’s the plaintain and horse tail ferns too, the black merrick, its optimistic puffs of yellow; it’s the dandelion, stonethrift, wild clary. It’s the beautiful bright things growing where they are not valued, or wanted; which insist on existing. A single purple Columbine, tall and conspicuous: I think of my trans friend in the Church reading hate mail signed In Jesus’ Name. All the people I have known who have grown in hard land, who flower, who were sometimes cut down much too soon.

I think of what lies under the tarmac; a cool world of roots, roots reaching to mycelium, a fungal network stretching far beyond the reach of each plant. I think of community, interconnection, mutual aid – the plants and mycelium network exchange sugars and minerals, water; how the network protects the plants from drought and disease. I think of pesticides and diggers: the best way to kill a flower is to take away sunlight and rain. The flowers will grow regardless of what laws are passed, what anyone thinks of us.

I think hard times are upon us and ahead of us. But we are flowers. We will continue to bloom.

Clare Shaw, Wildflowers and transphobia

This week: a lion-faced serpent god, the preserved body of a billionaire, memories of tap dancing, a brown-paper-bag existence, and much more. Enjoy.

The first bird I hear as I wake this morning is a wood pigeon; the promise of spring in its echoing tones. In the damp morning the cheerful chorusing of many birds is welcoming the day, and the air brings the scent of rosemary and twigs.

Alt text says this week’s photo is a beaver in a muddy puddle. I say it is a capybara sitting in the mud at Chester Zoo. I photographed it during a visit back in 2015 and the photo came to mind this week after a conversation with a wonderful friend.

Part of our conversation centred around the importance of being able to sit with someone when they are in the emotional equivalent of a muddy puddle. I loved the analogy… being alongside the person, acknowledging that it is indeed a swampy place, sitting with their thoughts and feelings for a while without rushing them to get out, without offering to try to solve it… bringing presence not solutions… simply being there with them in that muddy puddle.

I love a metaphor and after our chat I spent some time thinking about the times I have sat in muddy puddles of my own as well as the times I have meandered off my path to sit with others in their puddles. Those puddles have held a lot. Times of pondering, times of deep thinking, time to respect the need to be still for a while, times of silence, time to figure out the feelings and what is needed right now.

Sue Finch, SITTING IN THE MUD

At one point yesterday morning, a sea turtle patrol truck drove down the beach away from the sunrise, with one young worker guy hanging out the window taking pictures.  I assume that the workers get to see a beach sunrise every morning.  The fact that one of them went to such an effort to get a picture made me happy.

I’ve said before, and I’ll continue to remind myself that the human capacity for wonder makes me think that humans may survive after all.

Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Beach Sunrises

Recently, I enjoyed/endured a string of late nights (I’ll only do it for poetry), first in New York, where I heard extraordinary poets including Richard Siken, Ilya Kaminsky, and Ocean Vuong, and then in Chicago, where I heard debut writers including I.S. Jones and Noa Micaela Fields. I love the mix of improvisation and preparation that goes into introducing a poem—I learn as much about the poet from those candid moments as I do from the work itself.

This week, I attended a wonderful dinner for the National Poetry Series, which does invaluable work in support of poets, and had the pleasure of sitting alongside three former teachers: Deborah Landau, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Meghan O’Rourke. Fifteen years after my MFA, it feels especially meaningful to find myself working alongside them and still learning from them.

Maya C. Popa, Poems for Your Weekend

Recently, I posted about some poems of mine published in Creative Writing Department’s Print Journal. They were a set of seven pieces, all of similar style, called “Rat Heart Nebula.” Below, I’m sharing three more sections of it, rounding out the set to ten. I am eventually going to collect all these in a chapbook, but I’m not sure how many of them there will end up being. They are extremely fun to write. […]

Monstrous child of Sophia in the Gnostic cosmology, Yaldabaoth is the lion-faced serpent god who created our insane world. It does not matter if you think about this or not when reading.

R.M. Haines, BLUETOOTH SPEAKER YALDABAOTH

This is “Cupid and Psyche” (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) by Jacopo del Sellaio, from about 1473. Fifteen scenes from the same story are merged together, Psyche appearing 11 times. A tree in the foreground of one scene may form the background of another.

Time goes left-to-right along the lower part of the painting. Higher up, more liberties are taken. This style is called ‘continuous narrative’ – because, I suppose, there are no dividing lines between the different scenes/times.

I think it’s an idea that’s sometimes replicated in poetry, the same phrase representing a cause in one moment of time, and an effect in another. Recall and foreboding are intermixed with the present.

Tim Love, Continuous narrative

After the art gallery I had
skin tags removed
at my dermatologist’s office.
where I bought the most expensive
cosmetic I have ever bought.
I decided not to feel guilty about it–
my birthday was in two weeks.

This was the day after
the day I’d had
two poetry groups
back to back
where I wrote
poems
as vigorously
as a Baptist pastor
can preach
hell fire.

Rebecca Cook, The Sound of The Ocean

A gorgeous day as I rode the waves of a county road up from the river and into the glacial-carved bays and fjords of this county, rising into the air to crest a blind hill, easing past the slower vessels, a horse and buggy, a man in a flat brimmed hat pushing a bike, all sparkling in spring sun and new leaves pattering in the wind. Arrived lakeside, a park spread like its own picnic. A windsurfer coursed the chop of the dark blue lake. And I entered the community of food-bringers, of neighbors and friends, mostly strangers to me, chatting, no real laughter yet, as people assembled in slow spurts, some signing the guest book, some leafing through the photo albums, some pausing to hug hard the bereaved. I’ve done this a few too many times in the past six months. A spate of funerals and memorials. This one for a man I’d only known as a towheaded boy flinging himself around the yard, pausing briefly to pee in the bushes, too busy to bother with the niceties of a bathroom, or settling beside his tiny little sister to smooch or tickle. His mother, my friend. After we wailed together briefly, struck senseless by the simple devastation of her loss, broke apart to hold each other at arm’s length, enjoying seeing ourselves much unchanged after all this time. “He grew up to be a nice person,” she assured me, knowing I’d been a stranger to him, as we do not live near each other and had drifted apart. I will never know. Sudden death or slow, predicted or out of the blue, the shock of it remains much the same. Wait a minute, we wake to realize, day after day. Wait a minute.

Here is a poem by the ancient Japanese writer Isumi Shikibu, as translated by Jane Hirshfield, with Mariko Aratani.

“Why did you vanish…”

Isumi Shikibu (tr. Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani)

Why did you vanish
into empty sky?
Even the fragile snow,
when it falls,
falls in this world.

Marilyn McCabe, into empty sky

What I am referring to here is my long, missed diagnosis of OCD.

I have found myself fully tethered to Larry, so I resist forming bonds with anyone. It’s too painful. I don’t want to lose someone else. Yet I want a witness. We all do.

There is a feeling of duty and obligation to ensuring his work stays out there, so his presence stays…present. I want people to see my love for him. I want people to keep loving him and appreciating his work. Yet I am in a loop. Often, I cannot leave my apartment. It takes me awhile to detach myself from him as I am convinced he is with me (his ashes are in my apartment).

Via repetitive tasks, and mind-numbing repetition and panic, I do things that provide a false sense of comfort that life is moving on without him. Since he died, I’ve been legacy building. Because he was a poet and so prolific, such a talented writer, a beautiful soul. Because I love him and my connection to him is through poetry.

And if I repeat myself through these posts it is because I am re-processing, meta-processing, or processing things for the first time now, with some—albeit very little—distance. It’s only been 15 months.

The book I am working on of his, for example, had to be pulled apart and re-laid out. All 800 pages of it (long story which I will detail another time). So after I painstakingly worked through thousands of pages of his hard copy poems to get them organized, labeled, edited, and collection into an 800-page volume of never-seen-before poems, I had to read them all again, reliving each love poem, each drawing, each haiku.

And my algorithm feeds me more grief, I feel more grief, feel guilty for not feeling more grief. On repeat. Constantly in grief mode.

And then there is the very accurate notion in grief that we don’t experience just the one loss, it is loss over and over. Every time you hear, see, or feel something that triggers you, you miss your person and your brain has to adjust and say to you: “Remember? They are not here anymore.”

It is looping loss upon loss.

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas, To play with catastrophe.

The grammar of archives, of our accounting—
     more than just the language of the incident report

Dalamhati— grief of the deepest kind, 
from the Malay root for interior, something seated
      in the liver or the heart

Sorrow as more than affliction, because lodged
      in the body

Luisa A. Igloria, Souls on Board

i asked myself what i thought grief was. i used to know. or else, i used to think i knew, when i was young and young-in-grief, when grief felt as immediate and instinctive as arousal. when i thought i could name it; could call it by any single name. i thought that grief was an absence and an urgency. which it is, but not only this. it is also an accretion, a thickening in time and texture. grief has a taste, a colour and a shape, is shaping – reshaping – my attachments to others, to the world, to the body, to the “self”. yes, it is reshaping still. against the implied trajectory contained within much of western thought, that says beyond its immediate moment, your grief will diminish or fade. i used to dread this as betrayal and failure; found ways to – as i saw it – keep my grief alive and livid, insisted upon it as an ethics: that which we owe to the dead. silly girl, grief does not diminish. grief, if we allow it, is intimate, metabolic, and slow. grief is transformative. that is, as it transforms us, grief also transforms: from the emptying distress of acute personal hurt, to a rich and weighty way of being with. i think we are looking at healing through the wrong end of the telescope. perhaps we are using the wrong word altogether. supposing the aim was to acclimatise? suppose we sought not to reduce, but to deepen? to lean into this deepening.

Fran Lock, ON MEMORY #2

(Art unburnt in the pyre—a Cornell box carousel.
The chorus of little birds in the yard, psychopomp
for our cat’s last breath rising like smoke. Tears
I’ve kept close, waiting to share them with you.)

Lori Witzel, Smoke

Tom Sastry has published one pamphlet and three collections. Carol Ann Duffy said he “makes friendships and love affairs new and strange” and Hera Lindsay Bird call him “a magician of deadpan”. His poems have appeared in The Guardian and Poetry Review. His latest book is Life Expectancy Begins to Fall is described by Jonathan Edwards as “the most important – and certainly the most entertaining – book about the end of the world I’ve yet found”. Tom himself describes it as the perfect birthday present for someone with a sense of humour about their mortality.

The title poem – a sequence of six titled poems, each consisting of six couplets – is at the core of the book. It is linked to the Covid-19 pandemic and government decisions.

The collection is also a short master class on making titles work:

• How to tell the apocalypse is happening when you get all your news from Instagram
• Navigating the Peri-Apocalypse with Radical Self-Care
• The preserved body of a billionaire slowly defrosts in a devastated world

[…]

As I was preparing this post, Tom wrote to me: ‘You can be pessimistic about the drift of world-historical events and still hopeful about human nature and human connection. You can be hopeful about what might happen next week or about the reception of your friend’s new book.  There’s no link between optimism and virtue or between pessimism and cynicism. So that’s really the moral centre of the book – the belief that an age of pessimism doesn’t condemn us to live mean lives. We can live well as pessimists.’

Fokkina McDonnell, Life expectancy begins to fall – poems

Big workday today for me. And an exercise in joy. One of the greatest happiness an author can experience in the process of creating a book is receiving the first “proof” from the book designer, assuming you have a brilliant and conscientious designer, which I do in Mark Melnick who I recommend. Today I’ll be proofing my 2027 book COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES which, to my relief, pulls off one of my most ambitious literary structures to date. That is, I first wrote a novel. Then I had one of the novel’s characters create a poetry collection. Both are featured in CDB.

It was an arduous process over the past 3-4 years to create CDB. I first wrote another novel that wasn’t good enough (yet) to leave my files where it’s shelved as a “trunk novel.” I wrote a second novel, and from that novel birthed CDB. Literally a poet-novelist I am. From my Author’s Note, you’ll see that CDB has something for every type of literary reader.

The featured doll by my manuscript is the avatar for my novel’s primary protagonist, Kris–an orphan, a spy, a lethal killer, former head of the C I A, a community organizer, and a lover. He’s stared at me in my writing studio for the years it took me to create this book. He’s been ensconced over my computer to encourage–and pressure–me to finish this project. I look forward to the day I can present the actual book before his nose and hear him say, “I told you so!”

And someday I hope you will read CDB, which critiques Empire by going right to its root source: Sargon of Akkad, known for his conquests of Sumerian city-states in the 24th to 23rd centuries BC (last image). He’s been identified as the first person in recorded history to rule over an empire.

And yet this is also a rom-com. So: something for everyone.

Eileen Tabios, PRE-RELEASE NOTES: COLLATERAL DAMAGE BLUES

As I’ve been getting ready to get a final version of my next collection, MARRY | KISS |KILL together and issue it this summer, I’ve been thinking about my own experiences with self-publishing my work (at least the full-length projects, but this applies to chapbooks as well)  and how that might be of interest to other poets if they are considering doing the same in this age of dwindling publishers, slashed funding, and general upheaval in the arts. 

While I spent many years waffling over the logistics and benefits of self-publishing, there were many benefits once I took the plunge. One was more control over timelines and design (including books, like GRANATA above, with an art element, not always welcomed by other presses)  Another benefit is a greater share of the list price. This happens in a time when poets, even publishing with traditional presses, often share the brunt of promotion anyway for any collection, so that was nothing new under the sun. I also was producing work at a steady clip, impossible to publish all of them with the press that had issued my last three books. I also did not want to go through the work and expense of entering manuscripts in open reading periods and spendy contests, having already played that game earlier in my career. I was also in a great place to make it happen, having my own imprint and book design experience, as well as an existing audience for my work this many books and years in.

When I was initially contemplating self-publication in the early aughts, it was still very much a no-no if you wanted to be taken seriously and be seen with legitimacy (though I wonder how much of this was just the poets I was in community with.) Other communities had different ideas about it. There were spoken word poets who regularly issued their own work to sell at readings. The zine makers I knew regularly published their own editions of new work. When I started DGP, the first trial chapbook was my own, and when that went well, I moved on to publishing other authors. As time went on, there were more chapbooks and zines, but I still entrusted other presses with my full-length manuscripts. While I loved the presses and editors I worked with, it became steadily apparent over the years that traditional publishing, while nice, was not always ideal. My first publisher issued one book and accepted a second, but shuttered before it bore fruit. Ditto with another I later published with–same situation, one book released and another in-progress and abandoned when the publisher closed (I later issued this one myself, first as an e-book and now in print.) Other books closed out the print run after a decade (I have a handful of copies of these, but they are only available direct from me now.) 

Since 2021 or so, I’ve been happily typing and designing away since, issuing 1-2 projects each year on my own, usually available to all, though there are also some Patreon-only offerings.  But there are a few misconceptions I have often come across that bear mentioning when discussing self-publishing your poetry. that seemed fruitful to discuss.

Kristy Bowen, Self Publishing Myths Dispelled

To found the publishing company New Directions, James Laughlin invested $100,000 of his family’s wealth (about $2 million today) into the company. While he ran New Directions, James Laughlin lived on family property in a large country house in Connecticut. He lived off his investments in the stock market, as well as his generational wealth. Over time, he kept investing his family’s money.

I like New Directions; it’s a revered press. But Red Hen Press has no family money. Last night I was at a dinner, and someone said, I would never want to work at a nonprofit. Too unstable.

I know what you mean. It is too unstable.

There are many things I don’t understand. Can I make it from Point A to Point B? Why is Point B always so far away?

For me, Point B is the amount of money I need to raise for Red Hen to make it to the end of the fiscal year, June 30^th.

In this struggle, people might care, but no one is coming to save me. Despite some incredible ongoing donors, no one can guarantee the survival of Red Hen; few people have been able to connect me with new foundations, donors, or sources of income.

When I was in my fifties, considering the path of James Laughlin, I looked into the stock market. I didn’t put any money into it then or since, but I did look into it. It was another thing I didn’t quite know enough about. What exactly was the stock market doing over there? What was it up to?

We recently decided to sell some of our personal books that we didn’t need. I said to Mark, if you had a tiny amount of money, what would you do with it? Savings account? Stock market? Get a car that won’t break down?

I started without generational wealth. I did not have any investment income. Out of the cult, I had nothing. Later, I was earning wages teaching, writing, and speaking. Then, I started a publishing company. That’s when everything shifted.

I thought that publishing was an enterprise worth saving; that the building of literary culture was an enterprise worth keeping. I still hold this belief, still say this to myself, but maintaining the physical reality is harder. Nonprofit publishing in the U.S. comes from a small batch of people who decide to build literary culture. Most of them are writers. Those without pre-existing wealth often give up their own literary lives and are written out of the story.

My goal this fiscal year is to get Red Hen fiscally healthy. My other goal is to get myself an additional job so that I can be fiscally healthy. To be fiscally literate and stable, I need to make a living, and I am going to figure it out. I am going to carry Red Hen forward.

Kate Gale, What We Know, What We Weather, What We Climb

Starting a poetry press was always going to be an education, but I didn’t expect to be learning quite so fast. Headless Poet is dedicated to the art of the introduction: you can read about the idea here, and an interview with Victoria Moul, editor of our first pamphlet, here. The response so far has been really encouraging, and there’s a lot more to look forward to.

One question, rather obvious in retrospect, which has been preoccupying me recently: how exactly does one go about promoting poetry that has been (in the words of my mission statement) buried by time? Time isn’t the easiest material to shift. Come to think about it, how do you market poetry at all? Perhaps you just keep writing blogs. That was always the original plan.

Today, Headless Poet publishes Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected and introduced by Alex Wong. Alex is the author of two collections of poetry, Poems Without Irony (2016) and Shadow and Refrain (2021), both from Carcanet Press. He has also previously selected from the work of Victorian writers A. C. Swinburne, Walter Pater and Alice Meynell. When I first approached Alex last year, I didn’t have a particular writer in mind: he brings such a deep reading of and appreciation for the poetry of the era that we might have gone in any number of directions. But soon as he mentioned Hood, I knew it would have to be him.

Thomas Hood (1799-1845) hasn’t so much been buried by time as dismembered and deposited in various places — known for the odd anthology piece, but rarely read as a whole. I Remember, I Remember might be familiar to some (and it is a far stranger poem than it seems) but it doesn’t necessarily prepare you for the sheer exuberance of Hood’s comic verse or the astonishing, sing-song social criticism of poems like The Song of the Shirt. And yet: Hood was also a contemporary of Keats and Shelley, and could write a sonnet with the lyric intensity of either of them.

Jeremy Wikeley, New to Headless Poet: Some Poems by Thomas Hood, selected & introduced by Alex Wong

What I loved […]

was the man, out of place like the rest,
telling a bawdy story of standing

at the urinal many weddings ago,
when something drifted from his inner coat pocket

as he stood pissing beside an editor —
his poem, having escaped confinement,
landed in the froth.

The gentle man, already zipped up,
delicately picked the page up by its corner

and published it.

Jill Pearlman, Wedding Miracles

There is an actual Lake Isle of Innisfree. The note that accompanies the photograph says, “It is difficult to imagine scraping a living on the unpromising terrain of this island.” (Wikimedia Commons)

For most of the poem’s twelve lines, that place does exist, shining and almost reachable, in the evocative liquid sounds of its hexameter lines, dropping to tetrameter at the end of the first two abab quatrains, and resolving in pentameter in the poem’s last line. There’s a quality in these longer lines of, simultaneously, languor and urgency: the timelessness of the place, the exiled speaker’s haste to get there.

But can such a place exist? This poem, despite its maker’s dyspeptic later opinion of it, saves itself from the poisoning of nostalgia in its last lines. This Innisfree is real, more real even than the physical islet in the actual Irish lake — but only in one man’s “deep heart’s core,” where he carries the memory, which has become his own creation. It exists, but nowhere in external reality. You might want to arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, but you can’t get there from here.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I’m delighted to feature today a poem by Ricky Monahan Brown, taken from his recent pamphlet, Drawer of Letters (Broken Sleep Books, 2025).

The piece I’ve chosen is titled ‘Drawer’, so its significance within the manuscript as a whole is pretty clear. I don’t tend to be a fan of poems that use the passive voice a lot, nor of poems that don’t contain any main verbs. However, those two devices are actually used to terrific effect here, holding back narrative details that the reader is allowed to fill in, such as the identity of the protagonists. Meanwhile, progressively tweaked repetition is clearly a driving force, used deftly, moving us forward without any punctuation towards the poem’s emotional core. 

Matthew Stewart, A poem by Ricky Monahan Brown

Anthony Barnett is a kind of one-man cultural institution, poet, editor, publisher, translator, musician and scholar. He has published, amongst others, the original Collected Poems by Jeremy Prynne, and Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Collected Poems and Translations. He has also co-edited and published the journal Snow lit rev since 2013.

The first two volumes here display something of his range as a translator. ‘Whoever Has Found a Horseshoe’ is significant for being a rare unrhymed poem by Osip Mandelstam; it’s also his longest poem. Subtitled ‘A Pindaric fragment’, it reads to me, in Barnett’s version at least, as a meditation on the difficulty of art, of making things that are not, to echo David Jones, valued for being utile.

Barnett presents the poem’s ten parts one per verso page, each with a facing recto page illustrative drawing by Lucy Rose Cunningham, drawings which strike me as being integral, not decorative. The opening section, facing a drawing of a tree, presents a view of woodland as raw material:

We may face the forest and say:
Here is a forest with ship masts and timbers:
The pink-tinged pines
Freed from the weight of their clumps to their crowns
Should groan in a gale

Straight away, the utilitarian is undercut by the aesthetic; nobody will build a ship from a drawing of a tree, and for the shipwright, that ‘pink-tinged’ is entirely superfluous.

The fourth section addresses the difficulty of art, specifically the art of poetry:

Where shall we start?
Everything sways and splits,
Similes quiver in the air

While the next section addresses its value:

Thrice blessed whoever enshrines a name in a song,—
A song graced with a name
Outshines those that are not—

The penultimate section revolves around the title line:

So
Whoever has found a horseshoe blows away the dust,
Buffs it up with wool
Until it shines.
Then
Hangs it over the door,
To rest,
No striking sparks on flint again.

The polished horseshoe hung over the door has transcended its utilitarian origins to become, in its own small way, a work of art, of the impulse to make things over for no end beyond the pleasure it gives. The final section emphasises the poet’s identification with the finder, the trouvère, whose words are like objects dug from the earth.

In an afterword, Barnett describes the process of translation, this being his fifth version of the Horseshoe poem. He describes it as still potentially not finished, but it’s hard to imagine how he would come up with a more enjoyable version.

Billy Mills, A Basket of Barnetts

Mekyle Ali Qadir is a Pakistani poet currently pursuing his Master’s degree at Carleton University in Ottawa. His writing explores the negotiation of culture and ethnicity he enacts in his life as an immigrant from Pakistan. Writing in both English and Urdu, his emerging work explores South Asian cultural traditions, migrant identity, mysticism, and intertextual art. […]

6 – Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?

My writing is probably too theoretical. I’m very occupied with intercultural knowledges, negotiating my home traditions with Western modernity. My writing interrogates the assumptions that come with intercultural dialogues, especially in a place like Canada with all its performative multiculturalism rhetoric. I draw much of my inspiration from postcolonial thinkers who challenge hegemonic and Imperialist epistemologies, especially Edward Said, Fanon, Cesaire, Iqbal, and Shariati. I’m just regurgitating their words and adding personal anecdotes along the way. Aside from that, though I don’t count it as a “theoretical concern,” my writing is steeped in mystical thought and teachings. As I repeat throughout my answers, the Sufi traditions give me inspiration beyond these great thinkers. Mystical inspiration doesn’t work in the question-answer structure because it’s beyond language so it’s hard to say what questions I answer when I write through this inspiration. But a tangible result of it is a keen sense of empathy that pushes beyond personal and cultural barriers and lets me capture intense personal and social experiences.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?

I think there’s more creative writers operating at multiple levels of culture than we tend to acknowledge because they don’t call their work ‘creative’ even though it is. I think writers always find themselves in strange ‘moments’ in history, but now especially their work has been threatened by AI and slowly, their value is starting to be remembered in the wake of AI’s disappointing capabilities. I also think writers should see their work beyond its political impact. It’s a result of Eurocentric reductionism that writers are encouraged to think only in terms of political, material ends. I don’t think all writing is or should be political, though you can stretch definitions to fit your argument as much as you want. There are truths that transcend that, which all writing, but especially poetry, can uncover. I guess that’s what writers should be chasing after, to unveil Maya and reach the Gha’ib. […]

13 – David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

I see what he means I guess, but I don’t like to think of it that way. Writing for me is one form of art that has to coexist with others. The creatives I admire most are creative in multiple ways, it’s only now that we’re siloing ourselves into discrete ‘disciplines’. I like to draw and play music, both of which make their way into my writing. Poetry is a mathematical activity, sometimes a scientific one. Poetry for me is tied to my religious expression concurrently with all of these other forms. Defining poetry through delimitations leads to dead ends, I think.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Mekyle Ali Qadir

The famine in Damascus fell so hard that year
that friends forgot what affection felt like.
The sky above them grew so tight-fisted
that neither crops nor date palms drank a drop.
The ancient springs ran dry, and orphans’ tears
was the only water anyone could find.
If plumes of smoke rose from a household’s vent,
it was nothing but a widow’s sigh of grief.
I saw the once well-muscled trees unleaved,
each one poor and weak as the poorest darvish.
The orchard and the mountain, both were bare:
locusts had eaten the gardens; people the locusts!

Richard Jeffrey Newman, From Saadi’s Bustan: A Noble Man Suffers With The Victims of a Famine

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing a couple of different books about Homer and his “afterlife” — the myriad ways in which the Iliad and the Odyssey stand behind and within so much of our literature but also off at an angle to it. Texts can be both foundational and also irreducibly strange and distant. (The Bible is another good example of this.) Very few people can read Homeric Greek, let alone with real ease and pleasure. But at the same time more people, I would guess, know something of the Homeric myths than any other classical work. Stories from the Iliad and the Odyssey are a popular basis for children’s picture books and early readers as well as the fashionable mythological kind of fantasy aimed at older children and teenagers. This just isn’t true in the same way of the story of the Aeneid or the Metamorphoses (though those poems incorporate Homeric material, of course), and even less so of, say, Herodotus, Livy or Lucan. Homer occupies a peculiar cultural space: both almost entirely unread (in Greek) and at the same time familiar, friendly, even cosy perhaps, in a way that is unlike most other “classics”.

Victoria Moul, Bifold authority: Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida”

In the years since his death, no age of English poetry has been without its tributes to Shakespeare. Ben Jonson’s “To the Memory of My Beloved Master William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us,” written in 1616, the year Shakespeare died, graced the prefactory material in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, and John Milton’s “On Shakespeare. 1630” appeared in the 1632 Second Folio — which is praise from a pair of poets hard to match. And on the tradition goes to the 21st century with, for example, Wendy Cope’s lighthearted 2016 “Shakespeare at School.”

The centuries between saw plenty of work in this line, but, curiously, only Today’s Poem, “Shakespeare,” seems much anthologized — a sonnet written in his twenties, which appeared in his first collection, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, in 1849.

I haven’t managed to decide what I think of [Matthew] Arnold’s poetry. His reputation declined in the 20th century, partly with the rise of awareness of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but the 1939 study of Arnold by Lionel Trilling, a critic I admire, took the poetry seriously, as I have grown to suspect we must. Here at Poems Ancient and Modern, we have looked previously at only two of his poems, “Dover Beach” and the strangely constructed “Growing Old.” And I find, in my teaching and lecturing, that “Dover Beach” comes easily to mind, easily to hand as a way to convey the sense of something lost in the rise of modernity — something that large swathes of 19th- and 20th-century artists felt.

The argument of the poem is that Shakespeare stands alone, and the tremendous opening line, expressing that thought — “Others abide our question. Thou art free.” — is probably why the poem joined the standards of English verse.

(A test I use for literary reference is whether P.G. Wodehouse would use it for comedy, with an expectation that his readers wouldn’t scratch their heads. And sure enough, it appears in such stories as “The Reverent Wooing of Archibald”: “At imitating a hen laying an egg he was admittedly a master. His fame in that one respect had spread all over the West-end of London. ‘Others abide our question. Thou art free,’ was the verdict of London’s gilded youth on Archibald Mulliner when considered purely in the light of a man who could imitate a hen laying an egg. ‘Mulliner,’ they said to one another, ‘may be a pretty total loss in many ways, but he can imitate a hen laying an egg.’”)

Joseph Bottum, Today’s Poem: Shakespeare

In “Material Witness” Edward Ragg turns his forensic eye towards material details often overlooked or taken for granted, e.g. rock formations, coral reefs, bower birds, an old photo, and what these artefacts might show or reveal. The specific details of a small starting point widens out to a relationship, family history or connection to the natural world, giving an universal appeal to a personal starting point.

In “The Tap Dancer”, a photo of a dancer “with a Nazi stamp on the back” is revealed to be the poem’s speaker’s mother.

“My father recalled bright-faced GIs breakfasting.
So enthusiastically polite. How they’d throw kids
sweets from their jeeps (candy they called them)
before most girls and boys knew to brush their teeth.
My father wept for those pearl toothed men until
his death. My mother remembered tap dancing
and often said: I was always so lucky, so lucky.”

The poem shows the different attitudes towards the war. The father remembering candy thrown at children from soldiers facing going to war. For him, the war is a tragedy of these men who never returned. The mother, the girl in the photo, focuses on memories of tap dancing. She is not being flippant, however, as she considers herself fortunate to survive. Her attitude is one of fortitude and survival. The war is something she’s put behind her.

Emma Lee, “Material Witness” Edward Ragg (Cinnamon Press) – book review

Taken as a whole, Mountains that See in the Dark is a striking collection in which the austerity of the desert becomes a means of exploring emotional depth, endurance, and renewal. [Regine] Ebner’s imagist precision allows her to distil large truths into brief, resonant poems, revealing a world in which beauty and hardship are inseparable, and in which hope persists even in the harshest conditions. The collection confirms her as a poet of remarkable economy and insight, one whose work transforms the physical landscape into a profound meditation on what it means to survive, to love, and to begin again.

Nigel Kent, Review of ‘Mountains that See in the Dark’

I was having one of those dumb human hissy fits wherein one believes she will never again encounter another example of a beloved thing, i.e. a poem that seems to have been written specifically for her, when, lo and behold, Bob Hicok’s latest, Breathe, appeared unbidden in my mailbox last Saturday, courtesy of one of those remarkable human treasures, i.e. a friend who doesn’t actually know what is wrong with you yet seems to know the cure. These are the third and fourth Bob Hicok poems to appear in this publication, so I guess it qualifies now as a Bob Hicok appreciation vehicle, and that’s fine with me, especially since Breathe contains its own Gerald Stern appreciation vehicle in “A little wave of my hand goodbye,” my own love of that poet being decidedly well–established. Ideally those warblings have also made Gerald Stern one of your favourite poets, but just in case: “Logic” felt to me like a perfect Hicok poem, one you need not possess any particular poetic affection/affliction to appreciate.

Vanessa Stauffer, Two poems by Bob Hicok

I love the specificity of the blue tits, Lookout Hill (the one in Greenwich?), wild thyme, the Sphinx moth, the evening primroses, the turtledoves – it’s exemplary in how these are deployed without seeming in any way fake or outlandish.

I love, too, how ‘a rich lentil stew’ will replace ‘the gnarled leavings of a slaughterhouse’ (and not just because I haven’t eaten meat since 1982). My 1978 edition of the Collins Concise English Dictionary gives ‘leavings’ as an alternative for ‘leftovers’, but I suspect it’s an anachronism now – I wonder if it’s still used in Wombwell/Barnsley where Sue is from, though despite the places’ close proximity, my Sheffield-native wife Lyn says she’s never heard it. Either way, it looks and sounds just right, doesn’t it? When I attended ‘Poetry from Art sessions at Tate Modern from 2008 to c.2014, Pascale Petit exhorted participants to ‘use all the senses’, and that’s certainly what Sue did in this poem.

Above all, I adore how Sue ends the poem so beautifully, with ‘the crooning turtledoves’ – one of our most extinction-threatened bird species – and invites us readers to hear their song instead of the tomcats on their night-time prowl.

Matthew Paul, On Sue Riley’s ‘Cats’ Meat Man’

14 May is #dylanday, a day to remember Dylan Thomas. I am posting this as part of a Facebook celebration initiated by Lidia Chiarelli of Immagine e Poesia. 

Under Milk Wood was first read on stage at The Poetry Centre in New York on 14 May 1953.

Please find below some lines from my poem in memory of the poet. My poem was first published in Places within Reach (2006), an anthology from Indigo Dreams Press, edited by Ronnie Goodyer.

Tycoch

Tall rows of rainbow tulips line these ways
where poets, lovers, dreamers stoop to gaze
upon the mirror of the pool. A sudden spark
shakes up the surface like a burning coal.
We jump, and vow to leave before the night
sweeps down from Kilvey Hill: a rook in flight
spreads shadows on the bay and bares its soul.
We climb the hill where ponies used to roam
and reach at last the red, red walls of home.

Caroline Gill, 14 May is #dylanday

I promised a review of Juliana Spahr’s Ars Poetica, which, as the title promises, is a lot of poems about poetry—kind of a slim volume, not that many poems, and an unexpected large chunk of prose in the middle, talking about attending antifascist rallies where violence breaks out, being threatened by the ex of a friend with gun violence at her workplace and consequently going to the shooting range and thinking about a bulletproof vest—probably the most interesting part of the book. Juliana is seven years older than me but still in my age group (Gen X), started blogging and such around the same time I did, lived a large part of her life in Ohio (which I also did), and she’s a feminist who struggles with what that means. She also has some privileges—a lot of famous writer friends and a steady paying fancy academic job—that I don’t have, which she makes pretty clear in her acknowledgements, all ten pages of them (!). Is it worth reading? Probably. Is the best book of poetry I read in the last year? Absolutely not. (I would give it to Martha Silano’s Terminal Surreal, such a searing book about dying of ALS, or Lesley Wheeler’s Mycocosmic, such an intensely intelligent meditation on mushrooms and death. I think the people that choose the Pulitzer Prize are probably picking friends from their own cohort of academics, not reading too far outside their comfort zones, and boy, do they love poems about poetry. (Remember Diane Seuss’ frank: sonnets also had a lot of poetry talk, though her style is pretty different than Spahr’s.) I absolutely adored Marie Howe’s Pulitzer winning New and Selected Poems, which had a totally different flavor, which won the year before, so I guess it just varies by year. If I was a judge, I would have probably fought for a different book, but no one has asked me yet, LOL.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, Personality and Poetry, Hummingbirds and Goldfinches and Butterflies, Surviving Root Canals, and Melancholy Seasons

This sort of critique has been around forever: https://themagialipoetryshow.substack.com/p/peeing-in-the-pool-of-poetic-mediocrity. I recall such chat when I was 20 years old and all poetry was print; there was much to-do about whether being a poet associated with a university was the only way to be taken seriously or at any rate recognized at all. There were complaints that celebrities got books published while excellent un-famous writers struggled, waiting for rejections by SASE*. Poets often complained of cliques, of infighting and pettiness. There was a certain railing against mediocre free verse and “overly-confessional” poetry; writers threw barbs at those deemed too political or not political enough, or too feminist or not feminist enough, or writing that was deemed too formal for contemporary times. Recognition was a term I heard often in the 1980s. It was what mattered, apparently. Needless to say, I did not attain it. I think, in retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t.

Author Ali Whitelock’s points are not all off the mark, in fact; who has not suffered through listening to some embarrassingly bad (well, we have to learn somehow) or, worse yet, egotistical/narcissistic readers at open mikes? All I can say for myself is that when I was starting out I recognized my work was not brilliant–but I needed the practice and tried not to overstay my welcome on stage. Even as a featured reader, I tended not to fill the time allotted. Granted, it helps that I don’t write epics! But I’ve heard these criticisms of open mike readings and about gate-keeping literary magazine editors for decades, and also the charge that poets are aiming more for recognition (today read: “likes”) than for highly-crafted work. And also the claim that there’s a sudden proliferation of “half-arsed poetry” in the world. Nope. Not sudden or new.

Whitelock’s essay is likely meant to be a bit provocative. Otherwise why use such freighted language, or make sarcastic remarks like “Poetry, as we all know, is competitive…”? And her bullet points about how to know when you’ve achieved a poem worth publishing–Eh. Not objective or even particularly actionable, and what if the writer really feels that her mediocre poem meets those points, even if few others agree? Taste, after all, is personal. However, I do like what she says about writing poems: “The poem itself – and the process whereby it is achieved – is the reward. Not the likes, not the prizes, not the comments – true, false or otherwise.” I’m definitely into the process. “Likes” on social media are nice, I suppose, but they tend not to mean much.

Ann E. Michael, Complaints, critiques

A poem that disappears. A poem you can hold. In this self-interview, writer and artist Josh Medsker opens up about his evolving practice and the intimate, tactile world of his Container Poems—art objects built around a single emotional or thematic thread. As he puts it, each one is “an art object built around a theme — every element of the piece supports that theme,” a definition that becomes richer the deeper you go into his process.

What makes this conversation especially compelling is how it mirrors the work itself: personal, reflective, and rooted in relationship. Medsker traces the surprising connections between his Disappearing Poems and these new physical pieces, exploring how ephemerality and permanence can answer the same artistic question from opposite directions.

This guest post dives into the origins of the project, the emotional labor behind each object, and the way making physical containers has reshaped his understanding of what a poem is—not just text, but an experience.

Trish Hopkinson, Inside the Box: A Self-Interview with Josh Medsker on Container Poems

Prose, a punch in the face, a feather in the armpit, a snake that sticks its tail in one of its ears so it doesn’t hear too much music. I want my prose to be as tricksterish, as surprising, as osmotic as is my experience of the world, not just from A to B, but all points between and also those points that are not on that line. I want my prose to be as quicksilver as a mind and as tawdry or broke, as rich and as broken, as plain spoken or baroque. A passage of prose could be a various as what might happen from morning until night. I wish my prose to be as vivid and changeable as weather, as a drive through a city, sometimes with your eyes closed, sometimes with everyone else’s eyes closed.

Gary Barwin, Prose like a feather in face, a snake in the armpit

Two fairly different haiku of mine, both published by Tinywords over the last few days. I consider myself blessed with good fortune! That sort of thing doesn’t happen often with my poems and there are often long periods when I get nothing but rejections. That’s good too though – all part of the process. And polishing them up to send them out is also a necessary part of it too. I’m always learning new things, about the craft and myself, which is what keeps me interested.

Julie Mellor, Tinywords

Some of my early poems (in books now out of print, in online magazines that have disappeared into the ether) contended with my feelings about the general rebelliousness of our then-college-age children. Those feelings are now part of the deep past, but I can easily recall the self-questioning of that time, which lies behind this poem and others like it. […]

What business did I have
aiming the star-eyed young at physics departments,
at nights in mountain observatories
listening for beings who might not even have breath,
when all I want from the night
is whatever the psalmist heard, that shout of glory?

I know this much: the cosmos
is flying apart. The old drift off the signal.
The children have reached lightspeed.
The galaxies move away
in search of work in a more exciting city.

Maryann Corbett, Failing Astronomy

I’m sitting in a Bentley on Brick Lane eating a bagel from a brown paper bag. I’ve always been more of a brown paper bag kind of a guy than a Bentley man. You’d probably say I live a brown paper bag life. I would reply that you’re more likely to find poetry in a brown paper bag than in a Bentley. I may be wrong. I’m generally wrong. Sometimes I actually like being wrong. I think that’s my problem. I try to convince myself that wrong is where the art is. Isn’t that where you’ll find it? At the wrong side of town. In the wrong bar. At the wrong time. With the wrong people.

We’ve just been sitting in the right kind of place with the right kind of people. All of the beautiful, young and buzzing, hip and hopeful East London creatives. This place even has a sober open mic night. I’m sober but the idea of a sober open mic night brings me out in hives. Is that wrong? “Ya know what?” I say to Rob, “If there’s anything that’d make me want to pick up a drink, it’d probably be going to a sober open mic night.” And I know that’s wrong.

What I’m doing right know feels wrong. Rob has ‘got me in a room’ with a guy who might be able to help me navigate away from a brown paper bag existence and I’m pitching (I think I’m pitching) a poetry project. I’m pitching a poetry project to a guy who’s also done everything wrong but ended up with a Bentley. I need to qualify this: There’s a difference here between wrong and bad. He’s not done bad things (I try hard not to do bad things too). What I mean is wrong, as in being told “there’s no way that’ll work” and trying it or hearing “Oh, you can’t do it like that” and doing it.

Wrong is e.e. cummings dropping his caps, is Joyce abandoning commas and fullstops in a novel, is Kit Marlowe busting free from tight rhymes into blank verse then passing the mic over to Shakespeare. OK so Marlowe did a bunch of bad things too but all that other shit is wrong. It’s wrong and it’s good. It’s wrong and it keeps poetry alive and vital. It’s wrong to break the rules. But it isn’t bad.

Jan Noble, Nº64 What the hell is wrong with you?

I’m not a natural runner, but I have become a habitual one. I like the almost weekly feeling of surprise I experience when I turn up at 9am to the start of a run (not a race) with 100s of other participants. Finishing, however, is never a surprise because I’ve made that my only goal. Were I more of a risk-taker, more hare and less tortoise (to borrow from Aesop), I might run faster earlier, but then I might have to give up (so my thinking goes) and nap en route. As soon as I reach the home stretch, especially when I can see the finish flag, I feel confident and pick up speed. 

I’ve had several other finish lines to cross this week. These finishes have included the usual ones for teaching sessions at work; a printing deadline for the 2nd edition of a poetry collection I’ve edited for a friend (more on this soon); my own poetry submission for a collaborative exhibition in Girona in the autumn (more on this soon); a mid-May aim to get sweet corn planted in the new badger-proof section of my allotment (more on this now): [photo]

This flurry of finishes has been satisfying but also perturbing- maybe my motivation levels are shallow, and it’s only a deadline which results in completion?

But reflecting further on what I’ve learned from all those Parkruns leads me to think a little differently. I had, after all, to do the first 199 in order to complete the 200th. Slow and steady. The sight of the finish each time has been the measurement I need to judge the equation between the resources at my disposal and the task in hand. 

Liz Lefroy, I Sprint to the Finish

 I don’t think my desk or study has been messier. I keep meaning to tidy it up, make a plan, figure out what to do with the accumulation of books. And I will but I wonder if subconsciously the books that are piling up are an encouragement, a comfort. There are all these amazing books still being written that I am excited to read. I feel like I need to read them! So the books are shoring me up a little against despair.

Shawna Lemay, Let’s Just Title This Random Notes and See What Happens

this desire to just be
alone
with all these poems
swept away again and again 
by the bigger poem of my life

Tom Clausen, matrix

Little Woolden stole my heart. Follow the sat nav, and it might take you through a network of uneven roads, their surfaces alarmingly cambered by the old bog which sinks below them, or up a small, rough track, to an unmarked space for around 6 cars, and a burnt-out portaloo. Or walk there from Caddishead Library, down the dusty Old Moss Road, through wide open landscapes of wheat, low hills on the far horizon.

This is Greater Manchester, and the city centre is just ten miles away, but it feels like a different country. Directions to some of the smaller flashes, or areas of restored bog might read like follow the road through the estate, down the cul-de-sac, park up by the old folk’s home and take the path on your left. I’d walk down paths only trodden by dog walkers and find myself transported from the sort of depressed Northern towns I grew up in, to a sea of cotton grass, or a stretch of shimmering water where you might hear a nightingale sing.

I think magic comes in many forms. Waking to a snowy day, falling in love, stars. When I started my residency in 2021, I realized that Lancashire was full of secret doors, tucked down cul-de-sacs, next to schools, nursing homes, takeaways, off the main road, round the back of the estate. Gateways and tracks too often go unnoticed, but if you pass through them, you enter a different world and you leave transformed.

These words are taken from an audio trail I wrote as part of my efforts to open those secret doors so that more people can enter. Because if you’ve heard of Wigan in the last week, it’s probably because 24 of the 25 council seats up for election were taken by Reform. If you’ve heard of Leigh in recent years, it might be the murder of Brianna Ghey. And in coming weeks, the old cotton-and-coal town of Ashton-in-Makerfield will be the site of frantic campaigning and speculation as Andy Burnham seeks election in a local struggle that might decide the next PM.

But my concern is not party politics: it’s the bog. The bogs held my grief and my fear, and the surface of the flashes shone with hope. Call me obsessed, call me naïve (I’ve been called a whole lot worse) but if everyone felt a connection with the live green singing world around them, many of our divisions would melt away. As part of my residency, I took groups of young carers, asylum seekers, schools groups, onto those bogs. For a short time, what mattered most was how the ground shook when we jumped on it together, how the sky told the story of our loss, whether we had biscuits. How a stick could be a wand, how stones were precious.

When we connect with the land around us, we belong. When we listen to a bird, we are still, we are together, the environment is present to us in a living, singing form. It matters, and we matter within it. When you are digging, or cooking, or carrying a heavy load, difference melts away. When you are picking litter, or planting cottongrass, you start to see the land, and it sees you. When we are outside, or in the warm shared spaces after walking or work, there is air and light enough for all our stories.

The work of connecting everyone to our land is slow, sometimes so slow it looks like nothing. It looks like a cup of tea outside, or shared food. It looks like walking slowly so someone can catch up. It looks like teenagers swimming in Pennington Flash on a hot day. It looks like what we need to do, regardless of whatever we see it as success. It looks like light on the water. It looks like hope.

Clare Shaw, BOGS AGAINST FASCISM

after the rain
sunshine dripping
from the fig tree

Jim Young [no title]

This week: speech bubbles, egoistic namby-pambyness, the staid denizens of heaven, a rainbow in a storm, and much more. Enjoy.

/ hope’s ache, pinkly.
/ in the mind’s ill-mannered museum.
/ something is stirring.
/ claustrophobic and soft.
/ the bad idea. with its octopus of arms and gossip.

Fran Lock, OPAQUE OR “DURATIONAL #11”

Some flowers hold their petals for only a few days and in those few days they are likely witnessed time and again by what is most important, the pollinators, be it winged, footed, or the wind. The more-than-human world is always announcing itself, a lot of it silently, invisibly. The swarm of insects indicate the announcement of flowers. The perching of birds announces the quiet leafing-out of trees, the whispering growth of berries, the stock-still readiness of seeds. You smell of lilac announces the high-up cones of flowers waving at the sky.

Sarah Lada, Quiet Announcement

On the nearby peat bog and in patches on the croft, bog myrtle flowers opened. They turned from bright orange to peach and cinnamon. Each day the heavenly perfume rises and threads through everything, caught and transferred by wind. For me, the essence of spring, the herald to a year of light, colour and smell, of growth and possibilities, the fragrance of life itself, is found in this combination of myrtle-incense and peat. When cold easterlies blew, I sat in a sheltered nook near the cliff-top, facing west to the sea, and almost felt the scent of bog myrtle as a tangible thing, a stream of life, overpowering even the aroma of salt, seaweed and rock. This, this, marks the real beginning of a new year – when I am submerged in, cleansed and blessed by attar of myrtle.  

On April 22^nd I take a break from writing to catch up with the latest news. I see a picture of a small boy in a woollen jumper and long pants holding on to a chair and am completely undone. He is very young, with the stance toddlers adopt when they are first learning to walk independently – widely space legs, arms spread. His hesitant smile is that of all children at that age, wide-eyed, hopeful, ready to explore. He looks so like my youngest grandchild I need to study the image carefully to be certain it isn’t her. She is at the same stage, tottering around with her arms held out for balance, a smile of delight on her face as she investigates her world. Tears flow. I can’t stop them. Hot tears and a rage-sweat. I let it all burn out of me.

Annie O’Garra Worsley, April-May… the force be with you

This week saw my friend Catherine Broadwall launch her book Aftermath at the downtown gallery/bar Vermillion, the announcement of the Pulitzer Prizes, a new poem in the lit mag Assaracus, and the return of some favorite birds, like the Black-Headed Grosbeak and the Rufous Hummingbird.

Also, the Iran war continues and a hantavirus scare from a cruise ship. Plus, the Supreme Court continues to abuse the “shadow docket” in order to support an evil, racist regime. Is this all discouraging and apocalyptic? It is.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, A Book Launch at Vermillion, a Desert Rat Poem in Assaracus, Spring Bird Appearances, The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Are you getting much sleep? Are you awake with me at 4am? Can you see this beautiful May dawn light? I’m not supposed to be here, but here I am, watching and noticing the soft peach and pinks in the May skies, listening to the dawn chorus and sipping some mint tea. Are you ok? Are you looking after your bold hearts and big dreams? Not easy is it.

What a mess.

In every direction there is chaos, calamity, catastrophe. It feels like all the sections are wrong, like the forks are muddled up in the spoons section, like all the pieces of us are scattered. It feels like the script of this episode of you and me is being writen by a maniac sniffing glue. The news keeps reminding me of boys in the playground at school kicking the bins to make wasps fly out and getting angry when they get stung. Fuck about and find out over and over again. The consequences of all of this, the divisions, the bubbling hatred, the violence, this vibration, this unease, all the energy of humanity is cornered and angry and confused and frustrated and frightened and sick and tired as this ooze of misinformation and wildly unchecked macho egomania spreads like a stinky toxic treacle sticking to every leaf and idea, every wing and cloud of thought. It feels like our world needs to be drenched with sea salt and sage and rose petals and rosemary, take a deep breath, but maybe that’s just me.

I’m going away on a Writers Retreat and just packing.

Salena Godden, Death is another country

The other day I went out for walk. I went out for a walk in the same way I would go about making a poem – and I do believe you make a poem, you do not simply write it. I went out to seek connection. I went with an idea of where I was going but, as with a poem, without knowing exactly what I might find. I went with purpose. I went, as one goes to poetry, with the cautious endeavour of bringing elements together. […]

The walk began in Moorgate, London, beside the bronze cast of a life mask of the poet John Keats. The sculpture itself marks the poet’s birthplace, a London pub now called The Globe. It was originally called The Swan and Hoop. Ten years ago I took my poem, My Name is Swan, to every pub in London that, like The Swan and Hoop, had the word Swan in its name. I read my poem in around twenty Swan pubs. The performances were documented in film. The poem is now due to appear in a book. My publisher will be making an announcement about My Name is Swan and other fine titles on their list at 4:30pm UK time. […]

The walk took me north to Bunhill fields and to the grave of William Blake. Here I began to conceive of a series of walks, with each walk connecting two points of literary or poetic history within a roughly one mile radius of each other. The walks form single scenes, short acts, that move toward a much larger play slowly unfolding across the city. The course is plotted weekly and broadcast live, here on Substack on Sundays at 5pm.

Jan Noble, Nº63 Poetry is mobility contrary to the viral thesis

So here’s something I’ve wondering—do you ever wake up and feel you should be happy, but melancholy feels like a heavy blanket someone keeps putting on your shoulders? That’s how I’ve been feeling lately, besides all the beauty around me—I’m thinking springtime birds, cherry blossoms in bloom, sunshine, so much we decided to skip going into the Two Sylvias Press office this week and instead are working from home. But to look at one’s life and feel SO grateful and thankful for all you have, but then also kind of sad.

I’ve carried this feeling a lot throughout my life (it’s come and gone and returned) and I know with the state of our country, things are feeling a bit harder everywhere. So there’s that. . .unfortunately. (Also, promoting a book at that time feels beyond ridiculous.) I’ve found planting stargazer lilies feels hopeful. I’m learning how much of my hope is tied to plants, maybe because they are a quiet insistence that something is growing despite our human world. Maybe it’s the agreement a seed makes with the future—possibility, it whispers.

Last week I met with two good friends and one said she believes things will get better, but first they have to break open before they can be repaired. And I’m like, Great, love that for us—but is there an express lane to the healing part? I’m so impatient these days and just like with movies, I want to fast forward past the bad/scary parts. But time, right? We have to day-by-day it with our fingers crossed and hope in our back pocket.

I think that’s why I’ve been writing more—writing has always helped me, even writing these little letters to you. I found myself writing a lot of prose poems too, I think because they feel as if I can get all the stuffs in there. I’ve been waking up, putting on “Goodbye Stranger” by Supertramp (wait, maybe this is why I’m sad, that song has lots of minor notes!). Also, please don’t think these poems are good—there are many many many really bad ones, but it feels good to be writing.

Kelli Russell Agodon, Do You Ever Wake Up and Feel You Should Be Happy?

The cartoonist’s shape of speech,
its pinch-pot gnomon pointing out
whose breath it is, and isn’t. As if
the boundary was real, as if every
exhalation wasn’t both a way to
wipe clean the mirrored self and
a fog of unknowing. Those soap
bubbles in a vanitas still life. Your
warm breath in the shell of my ear.

Lori Witzel, Bubbles

I’m writing a bit but not with vim. Whatever vim is. A wonderful word. I’m painting. I’m plunking on my piano. I love that this is my life. But I’m wasting an awful lot of time wasting time. I’ve been pretty creative in my life, but I feel the potential in me to be more so, bigger in thought, farther in reach, giddier in play, bolder, broader, braver, more wonder-full, more experimental. But I don’t seem to know how to get from this chair to whatever that is, that place where I’m being bold and giddy. What is the environment that will best draw this effort out of me? It does not seem to be this chair. It’s not the chair’s fault. (Is it?) Are there people who can help shift me to this mythical place? Is it inspiration? As I’ve said previously, I don’t believe in “muses,” alas, or I could blame THEM, their mulish absence. No, it’s the brain. My brain. That wrinkly thing that’s currently a bit soggy with allergy snot. It’s a nay-sayer often, a builder of obstacles, a doubting thomas. How do I call it to order? How do I poke it into action? I feel a little lost, in fact. Do you ever feel this way?

Marilyn McCabe, text of earth, ocean, and breath. Let me, too, inhabit

I am easing back into my Substack reading, so if you haven’t seen me around, trust me, I will return. When life is this uncertain, it’s hard to concentrate—I keep running into these walls where I just, very calmly, stop doing. I just sit down on my suitcase and refuse to move. It’s called burnout. I’m working on taking care of myself, on having fun, on doing the things I need to do. Substack is one of them.

This morning I grabbed a few moments and ended up working on this poem. It’s been a while in the making. I dug it out and started to play with it. I have three versions here. Mostly, its the pronoun usage that I’m interested in. I would love your feedback.

VERSION #1

How can we not love this world,
the elegance of it,
the way it lifts itself
up from sleeping,
the way it spreads
a blanket on the ground
and carefully sets out
the potato salad
the chicken
the cold slices of pie.

How can we not love this world,
the mothering of it,
how she catches the newborns
and lifts them to the sun,
how she lays the backs of her cool hands
across forehands to gauge fevers
how she rubs salve on the congested chests,
ladles up cool water
whispers sleep sleep
sleep. […]

Rebecca Cook, 3 Versions. Which Do You Prefer?

Wow. There’s nothing like typing a poem out to realize it really is pitch perfect. Between 15 – 21 syllables in every line. Nothing misplaced. I think again of Elizabeth Bishop’s line that what she wants most in poetry is to see the mind in action. The leaps here from Dr. Martins to wild flowers to black widows to smoking to eating shrimp and making honey—to the speaker’s need to be seen as good. It all makes sense in the context of the piece. Beautiful, stunning sense. I adore this poem. I adore Jen.

The one time I was lucky enough to read with Jen was in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It must have been shortly after COVID. Jen offered to host me at her home which meant we had a good long time together. That night 5 minutes before our reading, I asked Jen if she would be willing to try a braided reading where one poet reads two poems and then the next poet reads work that somehow echoes what’s been read before. For example if Jen read her “Dr. Martins 1460 Wild Botanica” poem, I might read my poem with the line, “The season’s don’t fuck with me boots.”

In true Jen Martelli style she said “let’s do it,” and with no time to prepare we improvised back and forth choosing poems from our own book that chimed with the other. It was the most fun I’ve ever had doing a reading.

Susan Rich, Jennifer Martelli, Way Too Early

why not?
she stands in the sunshine
blowing bubbles

Bill Waters, Hopewell Valley Neighbors magazine: May ’26

I don’t know who reads this. I don’t know who reads anything I write anymore, or whether that matters. I’m not sure it should… but writing, to me, has always involved this effort to transcend loneliness, however brief.

A poem and a painting then, since poems and paintings are less canny than human beings. Poems and paintings cannot — and therefore do not— condescend to you. Nor are they careerists. However much the poet or painter who created the poem or painting may be a late capitalist careerist, the poem and the painting are free to repudiate their creators. In this sense, the poem and the painting are better than us.

Alina Stefanescu, Frank Stewart’s “Marriage Among Friends”

I can only read in tiny snatches at the moment. Gérard de Nerval’s sonnets have been a great recourse in such a situation: brief, crystalline and endlessly evocative, they’re things I can dip into in spare moments, particularly the ones I know by heart and can think about as I walk to the shops or do the dishes. I have no academic grounding in them and my French is limited so my responses are personal and subjective, but I think in the case of these poems that’s as it should be. […]

Loss and recovery are fundamental, recurrent notes in the Nerval poems I’ve read. We see them here in “l’ardeur d’autrefois brilla dans ses yeux verts”, in “J’ai revêtu pour lui la robe de Cybèle” and in “la mer nous renvoyait son image adore” – the first two full of energy and forward-looking purpose, the third ethereally reflective. In fact the more I think about it the more the whole poem seems a magical orchestration of the tenses in three movements – a first, eight line movement revolving round the bitter stasis of a present that seems inescapable, a second, forward-looking three line movement which draws life from an eagerly anticipated future, and a third three-line movement of rapt retrospection.

Edmund Prestwich, Gerard de Nerval – Horus, a personal reading

Beautiful, filthy Pittsburgh, I think, is all ye need to know. Like the key of a map, the phrase collects the poem’s principal features in one clarifying legend. Perhaps microcosm makes a better metaphor in the context of “The Dancing,” which is more interested in connectedness, in complexity and wildness, than a map’s simplified order can represent. At any rate, I think of it as a kind of signifier, distilling both the poem’s linguistic strategy and worldview.

[Gerald] Stern’s music is built of accretion, a stacking up of sounds into a sonic lushness that foregoes the simultaneously anticipatory and analeptic distance of traditional forms in favour of something I want to call more organic, arising from a corporeal present instead of a telegraphed future or reverberated past: one sound gives rise to its twin with a wild spontaneity. The assonance of “rotten shops,” the liquid consonance of “beautiful, filthy,” the pairs of present participles: there is patternless patterning here, the sense of both randomness and design.

Beyond the musical pleasure, there’s a familiar delight in the yoking of praise and denigration: how we love to hate our hometowns, or secretly cherish certain exasperating persons, the places and people who teach us the protean nature of our attachments. How quickly we shift, out of a need—real or imagined—for self-preservation, fall in and out of devotion. How tenuous the divide between what is precious and what profane. “The Dancing” holds this egoistic namby-pambyness in check, tames our proclivity for simplifying our inherent ambivalence into for or against, love or fear, praise or denigration. Pittsburgh is beautiful. It is also filthy. You can love something broken, imperfect. Even—in 1945—the world.

Vanessa Stauffer, “The Dancing” by Gerald Stern

The British poet J. H. Prynne died a couple of weeks ago, prompting several touching responses from his relatively small but loyal group of readers. Coincidentally, this past week I’ve been reading some of David Melnick’s weird and extraordinary version of the Iliad, Men in Aïda. That poem is an example of an unusual (but not unique) approach to translation that prioritises the sound, the music of the original — I mean not just that the translator has attempted to use the same or a roughly equivalent metre, or even that they’ve taken the opportunity (as surely all good translators do) to echo the sound of the original where possible, but that this version of Homer chooses English words based primarily on their sonic similarity to the Greek. So ‘Men in Aïda’, the title and the first words of the poem, translates menin aeide, the first two words in Greek (‘Sing [of] the anger’).

Melnick is not the only poet to have tried something like this. Louis and Celia Zukofsky produced a similar ‘homophonic’ translation of the poems of Catullus, which is quite often quoted in passing by classicists. (And can be useful for teaching.) The reason I mention this mode of translation is because, reading Melnick, I was surprisingly often reminded of the particular pleasures (and frustrations) of reading Prynne. Quite often Prynne’s poetry sounds rather as if it might be this sort of sonic translation of something else, of a ravishing poem in a language I do not know; which is not to say that the English words he chooses have no meaning. (Melnick’s words, too, convey meaning and even a loose sort of plot, albeit more often impressionistically than by conventional syntax.) Here’s a representative sample, from Down Where Changed (1979):

The creamy recruit pines
for his stone, down under
the second-best hiding

white at the foot of green

still white, ever green, love
offers the perfect match
ignites the perfect loan.

I think this is a pretty fair example. It’s far from the best or most beautiful bit of Prynne but it’s far from the most obscure or difficult either. And it ends on loan, one of his signature words. Prynne’s poetry pushes you up hard against the sheer strangeness of language and languages. But it also delights in language in the simplest and most musical kind of way.

Rather surprisingly, Prynne has himself been translated a lot — most noticeably into French (many separate pamphlets), but also (according to Wikipedia) into Chinese and German, and he even composed some poetry in Chinese himself. This week, I was rather charmed to discover that his first published poem, as a schoolboy, was a translation of Thomas Hood into German verse. Not long after we moved here I picked up the bilingual French edition of the 1999 pamphlet Pearls That Were (Perles qui furent, French edition by Éric Pesty, 2013), with astonishing translations by Pierre Alferi. I found reading Prynne alongside a translation in this way extremely stimulating: I suppose this is partly because the translator is rarely able to reproduce identical ambiguities; he or she must, instead, adjudicate between meanings held in suspension in the original, while attempting to introduce alternative ambiguities. […]

When I asked on social media whether people thought [Geoffrey] Hill or Prynne would have the more enduring reputation, almost everyone who replied made it obvious — more or less politely — that they thought this was a no-brainer in Hill’s favour. But I find so much of Prynne’s poetry, for all its obscurity, exceptionally beautiful and unmistakably profound. The fact remains that I am more often moved to tears reading Prynne than almost any other recent poet in English. This just isn’t true in the same way of most of Hill, even though I am in variously ways unusually well equipped to enjoy him and do indeed sincerely admire and enjoy much of Hill’s later verse. How is it that two poets who have embraced difficulty and the limits of language in such apparently similar ways can produce such different results?

Victoria Moul, Bank on the grammar flowing: on Prynne’s music

Catching the Light (Fairfield Books, 2026), the anthology of cricket poetry edited by Nicholas Hogg and Tim Beard, contains, as it should, several poems by the doyen of cricket poets, Alan Ross, including ‘Watching Benaud Bowl’: ‘Leg-spinners pose problems much like love, / Requiring commitment, the taking of a chance.’ But among the great and the good (Agard, Arlott, Dabydeen, Hughes, Brian Jones, Kunial, McMillan, O’Brien, Rollinson, Selby, etc.), there are many individual poems which leap out, especially those by S.J. Litherland – one of only nine female contributors – and Matt Merritt; the latter’s poignant pair of portraits ‘Two Orthodox Left-armers’ celebrates two Yorkshire and England greats, Wilfred Rhodes (‘Every ball an interrogation, / every over a conspiracy of art and science’), and Hedley Verity, who died in an Italian hospital of wounds sustained from fighting the Germans in Sicily (‘Shell-bursts, a net of tracers closing fast, / but as upright among blazing Sicilian corn / as on any Scarborough dog day.)

Another of the fine contributors to Catching the Light, Rishi Distidar, has just had his fourth collection published: Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak (Nine Arches Press, 2026). In it, his trademark quirky wordplay and use of form gets full rein – just a scan of the titles gives you the idea. At times, his wish to entertain occasionally spills into silliness, but that’s no bad thing in my book, and there are precious few other UK poets around – Selima Hill and Mark Waldron come to mind – who seem to remember that poetry can be something to enjoy as well as be moved by. Those familiar with Rishi’s oeuvre will know that he also writes poems on the most important subjects, like ‘On board the ‘Tynesider’’, concerning Martin Luther King’s visit to Newcastle in 1967, which ends with these beautiful lines:

But actually he was at his best
when he was harried, harassed –
by time as well as the times –
at 1am on a slow train to somewhere
he would never go again, minting
coin as easily as he breathed, currency
we still spend in the realm of hope.

It feels apposite that Rishi’s books should sit on my shelves between the Dickman brothers and Michael Donaghy.

Matthew Paul, Recent and future readings and recent reading

I reread Heaney’s worst book, Electric Light, in prep for an upcoming webinar on his style – something more clearly observed when he’s in cruise control. It’s fine; it lacks only a real sense of necessity, and is mostly superfluous to his oeuvre. Disconcertingly, though, it’s still better than almost everything else. So many poems of Heaney’s seem written at the golden hour, with the shadows stretching to infinity. The sense of history carried in his language – indeed in his use of almost every single word – never fails to humble me.

Don Paterson, Our Spring Reading: Part I

“And that sweet man, John Clare.” So, famously, ends the 20th-century poet Theodore Roethke’s brief poem, “Heard in a Violent Ward,” grouping Clare (1793–1864) with two other poetic visionaries, William Blake (1757–1827) and Christopher Smart (1722–1771). Roethke’s speaker prophesies to some unknown companion in an insane asylum that “in heaven you’d be institutionalized,” classing this mentally ill person, given to violence, with the three poets, and consigning them to the same ward in the afterlife. If this classification is jarring in its equation of violent madness with mysticism, it’s also a little odd, or else a little too conventional, in its view of heaven.

This speaker suggests that aside from the whiff of actual violence, to be a mystic in the vein of these three poets would imperil the presumed tidiness of the celestial order — as though the nine choirs of angels themselves would not know what to do with such a person, except to lock him up. Possibly Roethke’s speaker underestimates the nine choirs of angels and their capacity for dealing with people who think in visions. Also possibly, Roethke’s speaker underestimates heaven itself, casting it implicitly as a place where nobody colors outside strictly drawn lines and gets away with it.

Not that Smart and Clare, at any rate, really meant to color outside the lines. Like Smart, in conscious belief and practice Clare remained, all his life, a straightforwardly devout Anglican, orthodox in all his outlooks. Unlike Blake, he was not in any deliberate way a radical. But again unlike Blake, and again like Smart, he was given to what was delicately called “infirmity” of mind, and less delicately labeled “lunacy.” Sensitive and susceptible to disturbances as natural and predictable as the change of seasons, he was given to terrors as well as glimpses of sublime things beyond the defined and rational boundaries of ordinary piety. Or perhaps, as Wordsworth before him had suggested, the terror and the sublime were all one.

In Clare’s poems we might find the reminder that while the God in whom he believed might have established and endorsed those rational boundaries of ordinary piety, this God himself, with all the reality that flows from him, is not limited by them. It’s the visionary who glimpses something of that unlimited, and therefore unsettling, reality. Sometimes this looks like madness; perhaps sometimes it is madness. Suffice it to say that often enough, Clare’s poems arise from those moments when in one way or another, his own mental clarity dissolves and re-resolves on new terms.

His “I Am,” for example, written during a stay in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, gives voice to a mind striving to assert itself in darkness, while “Autumn” renders in verse the sensory warping that turns the vividness of a hot harvest-time day apocalyptically strange and terrifying. This turn of mind, in which mere sight becomes vision, transfiguring reality into something alien, simultaneously more threatening and more glorious than it ordinarily appears, may be what prompts Roethke’s speaker to assume that for the staid denizens of heaven, a poet such as Clare would be too hot to handle without a straitjacket.

Sally Thomas, Today’s Poem: A Look at the Heavens

Winner of the Hudson Book Prize from Black Lawrence Press, Bettina Judd’s debut collection of poetry, patient. poems, takes as its subject the history of medical experimentation on Black women. Her poems evolved, Judd explains on her website, from a series of watercolors she had been painting while healing from surgery. The paintings themselves, she says, “were influenced by the work of artists in the service of science and medicine who painted portraits of indigenous and African peoples for the purpose of study.”* For Judd, an African American, that source material raised innumerable ethical questions about the use of Black women’s bodies (e.g., as exploited medical subjects, as slaves denied their humanity). Given her academic research interests and the fact her own surgery had been performed at a teaching hospital, and thus was subject to possible study, it was perhaps inevitable that Judd would undertake a more involved project. What ultimately came into being was a multi-voiced series of poems, each able to stand on its own, that provide a narrative about some aspect of Black women’s violation and suffering at the hands of doctors and scientific researchers.

The history that Judd resurrects in her poems is, all at once, eye-opening, traumatic, disturbing. It is also sourced in facts. […]

In “Pathology.”, Judd introduces us to “the researcher”, who is both unnamed and embodied in the character of the antagonist J. Marion Sims, a 19th Century physician, called by some the “Father of Modern Gynecology,” who developed groundbreaking surgical techniques but whose medical ethics and experiments on Black female slaves were highly controversial and damnable.

How to Measure Pain I

In the woman it is a checklist:

Can you imagine anything
worse than this?

If the answer is no, ask again.

It is in this first section that we first hear from “the researcher” about the Black women Anarcha Wescott, Lucy Zimmerman, and Betsey Harris — dubbed “The Mothers of Modern Gynecology” — who “are taken into the care of a reluctant country surgeon in Montgomery, Alabama” and are experimented on: “In these three, Sims shapes his speculum, invents his silver sutures, perfects protocol for proper handling of the female pelvis” — without anesthesia or consent. (“The Researcher Discovers Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy”)

Lucy didn’t scream like most. Though sometimes she would moan—deep, long and overdue. I’d wake thinking death. It’s her, knees curled under, head face down, her body trying to move out of itself. [. . .]

~ from “The Inauguration of Experiments”

As the collection unfolds, Judd tells by turn the stories of these three “patients,” as well as those of Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, also African-Americans who suffered their own “ordeal[s] with medicine.”

Maureen Doallas, Bettina Judd’s ‘patient. poems’

Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator whose work explores Haiti and the Haitian diaspora’s culture, politics, language, and religion. The author of several poetry collections in English and Haitian, Sylvain’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in leading journals including Ploughshares, Callaloo, Transition, Prairie Schooner, Agni, American Poetry Review, SpoKe, The Caribbean Writer, and African American Review. His short stories are also widely published. He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow. Sylvain recently taught Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University and served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board. As of Fall 2026, Sylvain is Associate Professor in the  Department of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and Director of the minor in Human Rights at UMass Boston. His publications include Education Across Borders (Beacon Press, 2022) and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). Forthcoming works in 2026 include: Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan) and poetry collections from Arrowsmith Press (Fire on the Tongue), Finishing Line press (Habits of Light), and Central Square Press (Unfinished Dreams / Rèv San Bout).

1 – How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

P.S.: My first full collection, Zansèt (Ancestors), written in Haitian Creole in 1994, marked a turning point in my life. At the time, I was a member of the Dark Room Collective, a public school teacher in Cambridge, and deeply engaged in activism around democracy and human rights. I set out to write a book that would embrace the full essence of poetry without retreating from the political. I wanted to experiment with language and offer an aesthetic that departed from what many Haitian readers expected.

The book became, in many ways, a hybrid form—merging American poetics, which tend toward the imagistic, exploratory, and personal, with Franco-Haitian traditions that are philosophical, surrealist-leaning, and socially engaged. Its reception, including the generous preface by Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassègue, the former Haitian Minister of Information and Culture, affirmed for me that I could dwell seriously in the craft. It gave me permission to see myself as a poet.

Fire on the Tongue, by contrast, reflects a more elastic and mature poetic consciousness. If my early work emerged from instinct and urgency, this later work arises from a deeper sense of intentionality and self-possession. But that evolution has not been linear. What I once understood as personal growth has revealed itself to be inseparable from history, displacement, and the political conditions that shaped my earliest awareness. This collection engages themes of identity, memory, exile, and cultural buoyancy. It navigates immigration, adaptation, loss, and self-understanding—what it means to live with two feet on different soils. While grounded in a Haitian-American experience, the work seeks resonance with the broader condition of migration and belonging.

2 – How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, non-fiction or fiction?

P.S.: I came to poetry at fifteen, through love and through history. I fell deeply for a girl who had just moved into my neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Like many adolescents, I discovered language through longing—the way words could carry desire, absence, and imagination.

At the same time, I was coming of age under the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier. I began writing with what I think of now as a split tongue: privately composing poems of resistance against the regime, and love poems for the girl who stirred me profoundly. From the beginning, poetry became a space where intimacy and politics converged.

Over time, poetry ceased to be merely an artistic practice and became a mode of consciousness—a way of testing truth against lived experience. […]

9 – What is the best piece of advice you’ve heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

P.S.: “Trust the poem, but do not trust your first impulse.” That advice has stayed with me because it honors intuition while insisting on discipline—it reminds me that the initial spark matters, but it must be tested and refined through craft and revision.

Yusef Komunyakaa often echoed a similar balance when he said, “write with your heart, and edit with your mind.” I remember him once, sitting outside the Carpenter Center on Quincy Street at Harvard, saying, “allow yourself to be surprised by what the poem is revealing, and don’t force it to reveal something that the voice in the poem did not ask of it.” That idea—of discovery rather than control—continues to shape how I approach writing.

When I sit down to write, I often feel the presence of both Robert Pinsky and Komunyakaa not too far off in my cognitive and poetic distance, as reminders to balance instinct with intention, and openness with precision.

rob mclennan, 12 or 20 (second series) questions with Patrick Sylvain

Last night (7th May) I had my Manchester book launch at Manchester Poetry Library. It was a really lovely event, hosted by my friend and colleague Malika Booker. This event was a little different to Sunday – I did a fifteen minute reading, followed by a fifteen minute Q & A with Malika and the audience, and then a poem to finish. This time Blackwells was the bookseller – they bought thirty copies and sold out!

Actually, the real story is that the bookseller bought 30 copies but only sold 29 – someone either loved my poetry so much they stole a copy, or someone absent mindedly wandered off without paying…I prefer the desperate-for-my-poetry-so-they-stole-a-copy version of the story.

This week I also ordered a box of one hundred books, ready to take round to smaller events that don’t have their own bookseller. This also means I’ve got some to sell through my own website as signed copies – another way of getting the book into the world.

When I first published my pamphlet back in 2011, I bought some postcards and some tissue paper and wrapped it up before posting it to my first buyer. I found this process both time-consuming and strangely satisfying, and have done it ever since. My friend John Foggin (sadly missed) on receiving a tissue-wrapped pamphlet said that I always do everything with my whole heart, and I think he was right – what other way is there of doing anything?

Kim Moore, Adventures of the House

Kim wasn’t exaggerating – the launch of The House of Broken Things was magic. Up at Wainsgate Chapel, off the road where the ponies gallop to the fence to see me when I walk over the moors by night, up the stoney lane which leads past the chapel to my home. […]

And in the second half, after a break filled with cake and booksales, Jodie (Kim’s identical twin sister) played her french horn with Dave Nelson’s expert piano, and the chapel filled with a perfect sound, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry before Kim took to the stage again and settled the matter.

I would love to leave it there. I’d love to say that I had a wonderful time, and that I left smiling and feeling lucky and fulfilled but – that’s not how it goes for me. Time with people is costly, and there was so much chat; there were crowds and emotions and sitting still; too much sugar. I’d forgotten to wear my “I’m faceblind: please introduce yourself” badge so there was the strain of half-known faces, unfamiliar shifting etiquette, noise. I’d a migraine by the time I left, and come evening, I walked a long time in the darkness considering the strange animal I am, how I have no name for myself, how I don’t seem to fit in anywhere.

Then out of the blue, Kim texted to tell me how’d she felt calm when I arrived at the Wainsgate, and I realised that this place here, however rocky, however changeable the weather, is where I fit. And I carried on walking into the night taking photographs of lichen and bluebells with the UV torch Amy brought to my house because she thought I might like it, because I am a strange animal, and my strange little flock is right here. Here’s to The House of Broken Things. Here’s to poetry and friendship. Here’s to finding your kin.

Clare Shaw, Different Forms of Magic

Then one of the women who organized the gathering wondered aloud how it would change things if every reading series in New York included somewhere in its web presence, or at its venue if that were possible, a written commitment to what we now call diversity, equity, and inclusion, incorporating specifically a zero tolerance statement about sexual victimization of any kind. I thought this was a brilliant idea. Such a statement would allow me at the very least to establish publicly both a set of expectations and a standard of accountability for my series’ content, management, and audience. It would serve as a resource I or anyone else involved with First Tuesdays could refer people to when telling them about the series, as well as a publicly accessible code of conduct should it ever become necessary to call someone to account for their behavior, including me.

I wrote a statement, circulated it on the series mailing list to get buy-in from as many regulars as possible, and posted it to the First Tuesdays website, where it has lived now for more than ten years. I did not feel the need to incorporate it into our regular meetings, though, until we began once again to meet in person after the pandemic shutdown and I actually had to ban a fellow poet from our open mic. He’d read an egregiously sexist and implicitly racist poem for which he refused to take any responsibility despite the ample room I gave him to do so, first during the break between the open mic and our featured reader and then in an email exchange over the course of the next week or so. In that exchange, he criticized me for calling him out publicly, immediately after he read the poem. He felt blind-sided, he said, which struck me as a point worth considering, not because I thought I shouldn’t have called him out like that, but because if he’d never read what I’d begun to call the First Tuesdays vision statement, there was no reason for him not to assume our open mic was, like so many open mics are, more of a public square where anything goes than a curated literary space.

That’s when I decided to start reading the statement out loud at the beginning of every meeting:

First Tuesdays is an open mic/featured reader literary gathering where writers who wrestle with the issues of our day—from racism and sexual violence to climate change and economic inequality—can find an audience willing to embrace the risk and discomfort that come with sharing politically engaged, satirical, or otherwise edgy material; where those writers can coexist, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and camaraderie, with writers whose work is more traditional and conservative; where anyone who comes only to listen, even if they just happen to walk in off the street, can sit down with a cup of tea or glass of wine and feel not just welcomed, but challenged, engaged, comforted, seen, maybe even inspired.

At the heart of First Tuesdays, in other words, is an ongoing, proactive commitment to diversity and inclusivity, in both the kinds of literary work we welcome into our community and the people who come to share it. Nothing will erode that sense of community more surely, however, than the mistrust and hatred borne of sexism, racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, or any of the other far-too-many ways that human beings have learned to target each other for who they or what they believe. So I will state this plainly. Neither work nor behavior that bespeaks any of those “isms” or “phobias” is welcome at First Tuesdays, and I will, as host, confront and hold accountable anyone who brings either into our midst.

When I first started this practice, I explained it by talking about my exchange with that banned poet. Over the last four years, though, and especially since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, it has become something more important: an affirmation that gathering as we do every month, as we have been doing for the thirteen years that I’ve been running the series—and by “we” I mean everyone: the regulars, the newcomers, the featured readers, the people who just happen to be in the café when the reading starts—that gathering as we do to share the literature we make is in and of itself a form of resistance that we should not take for granted.

When I think about the impact that reading this statement aloud has had on the First Tuesdays community, I think about the people who nod along as I read, even those who’ve heard it month after month since I started, and about the applause the statement sometimes gets, and the softly spoken—and sometimes not so softly spoken—expressions of support I hear when I’m done reading. Listening as I read the statement out loud, in other words, matters to them, just as reading it matters to me. Because even if it feels like all we’ve done on the first Tuesday of the month is walk a block or two to the café to hang out with friends and listen to and talk about literature, we should not forget that there are an awful lot of powerful people in this country who would very much like to undo not just the community that we have formed, but also the capacity inherent in literature to build that kind of community in the first place.

Richard Jeffrey Newman, Sometimes Resisting Means Recommitting Yourself to What You’re Already Doing

Is it fair to say, as Micah Mattix does, that “The Nigerian poet and critic Ernest Jesuyemi was selected as a National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellow…until they discovered he was a Christian”?

Or is this too simplistic a description for what happened?

Was the NBCC board right to withdraw the full fellowship? Or is this religious discrimination? Does it matter that this is a fellowship, which requires working among community? Is this another artist cancellation, or is this categorically different?

Becky Tuch, I Can Buy Myself Lit Mags!

On a long oak table in a formal room
in Rare Books, on the library’s seventh floor,
is the fifteenth-century manuscript—Middle English—
from which I mean to wring a dissertation.
The work is verse, a church-year’s worth of sermons
probably copied by an earnest monk.
The librarian, anxious for this precious object
left to my handling, offers me a bookweight.
I settle into the captain’s chair and the task.

These first steps are detective work, forensics.
Hand: Anglicana; Secretary features.
Materials: paper. Visible watermarks.
A lot of Northern spellings. I warm to this,
matter and form, but I’m especially held
by matter, tangibles: the ink, the paper.
Though faded, the pen strokes have the ebb and flow
of a bending quill tip in a moving hand.
The heavy paper still shows peaks and troughs
that speak to the moving pen. My own right hand,
knows pens and writing, and it feels these moves,
knows in its bones another hand was here.

Maryann Corbett, Academic dreams . . .

I was surprised and a little unsettled by Kariega, the last poem in the book, in which the narrator and a companion paddle upstream through the game reserve of this name in the Eastern Cape. The journey is to escape the ‘concrete, tar or plastic’ of so-called civilisation, to explore the river – ‘And there’s an island far ahead where we’ll rest and eat/ with the waterbuck, the crabs and blacksmith plovers/ where the world is as it has always been, quiet and slow’. He ponders the passing of time and the inevitable end to life that I suppose most of us who have long kissed goodbye to seventy will think on here and there and considers if the end were to come it would not seem tragic if it happened in such a place. It’s a fine poem. My surprise was because, having only a very limited knowledge of South Africa, I looked up Kariega before reading the poem. It is home to a vast Volkswagen factory, supposedly the largest car factory in Africa. I expected this to come into the poem somewhere in contrast to the reserve and wonderful natural wilderness that stretches away from the town. I thought about why [Harry] Owen avoided this rather obvious contrast – and concluded that sometimes, perhaps, the power is in what is left unsaid. That view, however, relies on a knowledge of place that perhaps only a few outside South Africa would connect with.

Following on, I think when a poet is from another country – Owen was born in Liverpool but has lived in South Africa a long time now – the reader needs to attempt to understand at least the sense of the place in which a book is written. Mindforest is not exclusively bound to South Africa but it supplies much of the backdrop. My glimpses of the world in which he immerses himself, and hopefully via the poems us, were long ago. I had a couple of work trips to South Africa in 1994 and 2001 and they were confined largely to the surreal creation that is Sun City and to Johannesburg, where I found, at that time, the city centre was more dangerous, darker and considerably less welcoming than Soweto, where I needed to go to visit a boxing gym and so obviously took time to look around. Necessity and time confined me. The wider landscape of the country I experienced only in passing, in travelling through. Still, it’s something I could work with in reading the book.

I think it’s fair to say that Owen has developed as a poet later in life and perhaps this is to his advantage. Those who find a ‘voice’ or success early on sometimes burn out and the opportunity to use the supposed wisdom that comes with age is lost. Not so here, as the poet acknowledges in the poem Epiphany, which perhaps describes what it feels like for so many of us not born into financial privilege and academic expectation.

Bob Mee, REFLECTIONS ON MINDFOREST by HARRY OWEN

Back in January, I attended a conference in Cambridge on “Creative Medievalisms”. Among recurring threads of conversations throughout the event was a ripple of ideas about voice — the human voice, the creative voice, our personal voice. Margery Kempe cropped up repeatedly in these discussions, as did the ventriloquized voice of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. In “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue”, Chaucer lets the garrulous, “gat-toothed”, bawdy Wife speak at length, giving her free rein in the longest prologue of any pilgrim-teller in The Canterbury Tales. Veering between learned argument in which she takes on Church teaching on marriage and virginity and earthy vignettes of her life with her five husbands (“in his owene grece I made hym frye” she says acerbically of husband number four), the Wife is a lively, funny, engaging interlocutor. As she courts controversy she is interrupted within the Prologue by (male clerical) pilgrims who don’t like what she is saying or object to her going on for so long.

In fact, the Wife is such a distinctive character that, as Marion Turner observes, she is referred to by other speakers in The Canterbury Tales and emerges after Chaucer’s lifetime as a literary figure in her own right. She is even described by Thomas Hoccleve (1368-1426), a poet who knew Chaucer and promoted his reputation after his death, as a specifically female authority (auctrice) on the subject of women’s displeasure at men’s depiction of the female sex: “The wyf of Bathe, take I for auctrice” (“Dialogue”, 694). The Wife is the Chaucerian voice that escapes the bounds of the text and the control of its author to take on a life of her own.

Yet despite her unique voice, Chaucer’s Wife is also in some ways utterly unoriginal, a creation based on the anti-feminist discourse of the time, sometimes viewed as nothing more than a collection of misogynist ideas brought to life. Chaucer was entering into a contemporary debate that was crowded with authorial opinions. Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) a catalogue of illustrious women is designed to respond to the anti-feminists. Although the style and form is very different, there is a common purpose with Chaucer’s Wife. Where Chaucer offers us the voice of an ordinary middle-aged woman with a wealth of experience of marriage, in The Book of the City of Ladies we encounter a dreamscape in which the Lady Reason, the Lady Rectitude and the Lady Justice explain to Christine that they will debunk all the misconceptions about women. Abounding in examples from history and myth, with a core of philosophy and a sharp critical eye for inconsistency, we can detect in Christine’s detailed rebuttal to the misogynists, something akin to the Wife’s vivacious and rather one-sided argument with the clerks. The subject matter overlaps, but the individual voices of the authors take the material in different directions.

The creative voice then is the thin thread, the wisp of experience and meaning that the individual brings to the discourse, orchestrating the interplay between the living and the dead. In the words of John Keating, the teacher played by Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, it is the verse that we contribute to the play. Now, whenever we talk about voice, there is the unavoidable subtext of what it means to write in the age of AI when a pattern-recognition machine can spew out sense-making words. As someone who loves the struggle of writing and wrestling with words on the page, I cannot imagine why I would want my creative hand guided by a robot and I find it difficult to care about text that is not written by a human. It’s ersatz writing to me, no more than a poor substitute for the real thing. It removes the thin thread that makes the writing worthwhile for the author and meaningful for the reader.

Ruth Lexton, The Creative Voice

The voice that is great outside us. Between us. That is all of us.

So often we’re taught to find our “voice”—both as people and as writers. But I’ve always thought that this notion of “voice” is reductive and essentialist. I’d rather imagine our “voice” to be more about the range of ways that we interact with the world and the range of relationships we have. As a writer, also. What are the ways we relate to language, culture, writing, to process. To our processing of the world and how we (and our words and our notion of words) are processed by the world.

Imagine a sculptor bringing a set of objects with which to build a sculpture. I feel that their “voice” is not so much about the objects as it is their way of considering and engaging with these objects. Perhaps the process of accumulating the objects, the way they put those objects together. The way they are open to what the object are saying.

We are always already part of the work, the world. We don’t have a singular “voice,” any more than we exist as independent organisms apart from the world. Our bodies/selves require the infrastructure of the world: air, warmth, food, bacteria, shelter, other humans. Each individual is the result of their engagement with this infrastructure. So, all writing relies on the infrastructure, the betweenness, the interrelationships, of language and humanity, readers and the society and culture that by definition surrounds the writer, their work, and the process of their work.

A writer doesn’t need to find their “voice,” but instead to develop awareness and tools for considering and realizing process, for considering their entanglement, inter- and intrarelations, their I’m-soaking-in-it-Madgedness.

Is there a self without interaction? Is there a writer?

Gary Barwin, The voice that is great outside us: writer as part of the necessary polycule

I was a latecomer to poetry, curling my nose at it in that confounding and rather embarrassing way we have of discounting what we don’t understand, dismissing as useless what we don’t know how to use. And then I met Emily Levine. Across the aisle on a transatlantic flight, across our half century of age difference, we became instant and abiding friends.

Intellectually dazzling, creatively mischievous, and ecstatically funny, Emily took it upon herself to open my world to poetry, reading me a poem a day, peppering with poems our rapturously roaming conversations about semiotics and the singularity, the physics of flight and the evolution of flowers, Hannah Arendt and The Beatles, until I came to love poetry and, eventually, to write it. Emily is the reason The Universe in Verse exists.

When she was dying — which she did with such vivifying reverence for reality — we began taking long weekends by the ocean, reading poetry and talking about the meaning of life. The poems she brought were always a revelation, down to the very last one, which became a lifelong favorite I revisit whenever I lose perspective.

Maria Popova, Poetry: I Too, Dislike It

— I recently read the short book, brief notes on the art and manner of arranging one’s books by George Perec. I’m immersed in reading about the history of classification as it regards books right now for the novel I’m writing. Perec also says interesting things about the daily, the habitual. “The daily papers talk of everything except the daily,” he says. And, “How should we take account of, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the back-ground noise, the habitual?” He goes on: “To question the habitual. But that’s just it, we’re habituated to it. We don’t question it, it doesn’t question us, it doesn’t seem to pose a problem, we live it without thinking, as if it carried within it neither questions nor answers, as it if weren’t the bearer of any information.” […]

— I recently picked up Imagining What We Don’t Know by Lisa Samuels, admittedly because the title refers to something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately: Imagining, the imagination, our power of imagination, the importance of our imaginations.

— From the Lisa Samuels book: “Beauty is a problem for poetry because we no longer imagine beauty as a serious way of knowing. But it is. Beauty wedges into the artistic space a structure for continuously imagining what we do not know.” She notes that taking beauty seriously and working on theories of beauty “is out of fashion.” But she says, “Forms of beauty are resistant structures, imaginative structures that present an impenetrable model of the unknown. Beauty is therefore endlessly talk-inspiring, predictive rather than descriptive, dynamic rather than settled, infinitely serious and useful.”

— To reiterate: beauty is a serious way of knowing! Yes.

Shawna Lemay, Notes on Beauty, Books, Imagining, the Soul’s Skeleton, and a Smoking Angel

Since nothing is ever complete, the poetry book I wrote about my mother, Diaspora of Things, seems like a light-sensitive print of where I was a few years ago.  The relationship keeps evolving.  The deeper I get into motherhood – all these years now! – the more I slide alongside her, intuiting her unsaid about joy, loss, “annoying aspects of inevitable change,” freedoms gained and realities of our limits.  In strange morning dreams, so kitchen-sink and unsentimental, I’m waking up to the twists that adult children exert on mothers, and how much I got away with!  Doris had a taste for the radical, and more patience than I give her credit for.  To the complexity and mystery of motherhood, and the sister-soul that walks along with us on our journey!

Jill Pearlman, Diaspora of Affections

It has been a time of moments recently. Stillness. Patience. A buzzard on a fence post. Applauding a flyover from a heron. A rainbow in a storm. A 5p found on the ground at a motorway service station. That tyre pressure light. Seizing the moment to drink tea on the settees of family and friends. Asking for a drink in a coffee shop by using its advertising tagline to see if the person taking the order laughs.

And a new writing desk. Sometimes I spend too long flicking through my phone, but recently it led to a serendipitous moment when I saw that a friend had a writing desk for sale. Mine was old and faithful, and it always surprised me just how much I could get done in such a small space – so many poems and videos and meetings and essays and coaching sessions. It was originally gifted to me many, many moons ago by a neighbour of my grandparents and has easily fitted into every place I have ever lived. It has been well and truly loved and as it retires I tip my hat to just how well it has served me. And now into service comes a new beauty, with space aplenty. This then reminds me of that time we were asked to bring something to show which was important to us when I first started my coaching training. Being a little nervous at starting something new I had everything ready, but felt the urge to double check before the meeting started. I felt a little bit clumsy and fumbly (and everything was crowded into a small space) and as I reached for the glass paperweight to check that it wasn’t dusty before I shared it with a group of new people, I knocked my hand on my laptop screen and promptly dropped my show and tell object into my glass of water. I do like to be ready for things before they happen, so my heart beat a little bit faster as I dipped my hand in to retrieve it and hurriedly wiped it on my jeans to dry it off. At least that solved the dust problem, I told myself as I took a deep breath and clicked to join the meeting. 

I am pretty confident that my readiness will be easier where I now sit so here’s to finding the space we need for the things that bring us joy, and for appreciating the old and the new!

This past week I was keen to find out what kind of poem would be the first to be written at my new desk (and when it would take shape). Pleasingly it was a love poem that flowed. They are quite rare for me and come with a little fanfare and sparkles when they arrive.

Sue Finch, THAT’S NOT MINE, MINE’S CRISPY…

Now is the time of spring’s coolness. The breeze and shade detain the heat. The trees look fresh and new. But the flowers are falling. The blossom is over and the rhododendrons and azaleas are nearly over. Far away in north D.C., the tulips at Hillwood House are peaking and about to wilt. Here the tiny blue flowers by the path will soon go to seed. As we walk back to the car, we hear an oven bird, whose loud clear song fills the forest from some hidden spot. So much of what we have seen are tropes from American films, and tropes of real American life. The oven bird is familiar from Robert Frost. “He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.”

The sun has begun its decline. One of the fishing boats is gone now. The young man in headphones is sloping back. Bikers are strapping their bikes onto car racks. As we leave the forest, we come back to aggressive American driving, the need to get things done before bed. The late sun sinks behind the trees and lights the undersides of the high-raised roads. Dogwood flowers gleam in the evening glow. We pass the filling stations and see the price of gas is rising, rising. A fire truck goes past. The 24-hour diner sign still shines. There were two dozen cars at the shore when we left—owners and boats were still launched on the Occoquan.

In Washington, there are secrets, heard and unheard, in Congress, the White House, and the Court—at Langley, Rosslyn, the Pentagon— and in all the agencies and institutions and non-profits that fill the grid. Somewhere back in the woods, the oven bird is still singing. “The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing.”

Henry Oliver, He says the early petal-fall is past

I’ve read that the turn in a poem is a key to the closing, and ending lines will be stronger depending on how near they are to (or distant from, and evocative of) the turn. This seemed helpful revision advice. Yet does every poem require a turn? The idea of the volta is ancient indeed, but it need not be a prescription for all the poems in the world. Poetry from other than Western cultures often proceeds quite beautifully without a turn, and does that mean that such a poem is static? That’s often seen as a negative in art: when nothing moves, or moves the viewer. I’d like to refer my readers to L.A. Johnson on Jericho Brown’s duplex form, “Radical Stasis” in Poetry. What could be more static than repetition? And yet in Brown’s work, the lack of a turn implies circularity, not necessarily ambivalence and certainly not a lack of movement. Johnson calls it a transformation.

I want to experiment with how altering a poem’s closing might lead to changing the poem’s form or structure for a stronger impact. Another option I’ve used is moving the last lines to the start or near the start of the poem. Maybe those lines weren’t really the image or idea that particular poem was aiming for. And then there is docking the tail of a poem. It may be a cruel practice for dogs and horses, but a poem can benefit from a careful removal of the unnecessary closing line(s). Closing lines that summarize a point can wreck my delight in a poem, and alas, I tend that way sometimes…I spent my childhood Sundays in church, listening to my dad declaim from the pulpit. The oral and rhetorical structure of sermons is routed into my brain, and that can be a real problem when I draft. Poetry can be many things, but I don’t care for poetry that sermonizes.

At any rate, I have a LOT of unfinished drafts that might benefit from change-ups. Instead of writing a blog post, I ought to be working on those!

Ann E. Michael, Closure

And what about that final quote? It’s italicised and in speech marks. Did the horn blow the tune to which that ballad was originally set? Is that Childe Roland speaking about himself in third person, suddenly seeing himself from a distance (the distance of death)? Is that the storyteller Browning’s voice suddenly breaking into the dramatic monologue?

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ is the title of the poem too, so to end with the same words almost suggests something circular. We have returned to the start, in a kind of Groundhog Day. Childe Roland will never get to the tower but be stuck in this perpetual circle of hell forevermore… And it’s worth mentioning that time is supposed to work differently in Elfland or Faerie Land. Perhaps it loops.

It’s a sinister, unsettling ending, deliberately ambiguous. But perhaps that is why it continues to fascinate and inspire. It creates a desire that it refuses to satisfy. Browning’s neverending story continue to haunt our literary culture.

Clare Pollard, Reading ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ by Robert Browning

       I could translate all this into words like hunger
or gift, witness or mercy. But I choose not to.  
   I consider the breath that unraveled so quickly, how 
       the future briefly arrived, without fanfare or song.

Luisa A. Igloria, Life Study